Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program. We did in months what we had originally planned to do in years. As we are able to open our operations center further, it's clear that we'll be providing fewer jobs than we did before. At least some part of that is the result of automation. I can't help but think this same pattern is playing out at other companies right now.
It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed.
Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them.
I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.
> I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.
In such an economy there's no incentive to work on further automation. In particular if there's a part of world where profits aren't distributed evenly - the innovation and manufacturing will move there.
It’s a question of implementation. Consider say a 10% dividend on the economy, in the US that’s 6,300$ per year per person. Which does not sound like much to live on, but historically represents a significant income. Not that the US would adopt such a system, but it could by cutting back other spending like social programs.
A tiny group might try to live in it, but more would see seasonal jobs as enough. As automation improves in general people would work less over their lifetime. Critically this would likely slow down the economy in the short term, but the constant minor labor shortage would presumably push for ever more automation to offset this.
Unfortunately, it needs to be a pay go system based on a fixed economic percentage to really work. But, assuming it was the general population would suddenly have a huge incentive to promote automation and economic growth.
10% of billions of dollars is plenty enough to cause the companies to move to some tax heaven. You can fight that with tariffs, but the end game is being outproduced by orders of magnitude and losing any influence over global market.
Apparently we can win the cold war, but can't sort out tax accounts of a coffee company. Starbucks can report record profits to wallstreet, and losses to the exchequer in the same month.
Read about industrialisation of United States and history of tarrifs. US had plenty of them when the British Empire was the industrial powerhouse.
Automation goes beyond manufacturing. Even a simile spell checker saves a lot of time over doing it manually.
That said, labor has been cheaper outside the US for decades, yet manufacturing is still 2+ Trillion dollars per year in the US. In part it’s because you can’t simply move farms, oil wells, or forests etc. But, business friendly regulations, educated workers, efficient transportation, etc are also huge contributors.
I think there's an intrinsic human drive to be useful. It makes sense evolutionarily: the tribe can't kick you out if they rely on you for something. It's no guarantee of safety or success, but it's a bargaining chip.
Kevin Simler (via Dennett) goes as far as modeling this phenomenon on the level of individual neurons [0]: that conditions like depression and grief can be thought of as neurons and their networks becoming suddenly obsolete, and casting about trying to find new ways to be useful.
The employment model is hardly perfect; if anything, it has an uncomfortably feudal flavor in practice, where one is a thrall/vassal for 40(+) hours/week, in exchange for autonomy the other 128(-); and where one has the option to seek a new lord if sufficiently dissatisfied. There are countless other ways to be/feel useful outside that model: entrepreneurship, non-profit/community work, raising children, passion projects.
There are also potential perverse incentives: in particular, to maximize the problem one purports to solve. The most obvious parallels are the military- and prison-industrial complexes; planned obsolescence is another milder example. It's easy for unions to tip from collective bargaining into protectionism of industries that we'd like to become obsolete (prison guards, coal miners), out of a very understandable desire for those individuals to not lose their social bargaining chips.
So I do think we should celebrate the idea of "employment", as such, becoming optional; I strongly favor UBI. But at the same time, we need to be thinking about new institutions and proactive strategies for people to be, and feel, useful. I dare say, in some cases we want to be spending the economic surplus from the efficiency of automation, on intentionally inefficient pro-social economic activity. One example might be a community garden: it's a safe bet that industrial agriculture will always be an order of magnitude more efficient at producing food; but the community garden has other benefits, of connecting humans to nature and to each other (and perhaps a bit of resilience against supply chain disruption).
Yes, "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."
Bucky Fuller pointed out that we could apply technology to solve our problems efficiently and wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever.
(FWIW, this is the context within which I think UBI makes sense, and we are not there just yet.)
Really it's a choice (at least in theory, maybe we are strapped in but I like to think we can affect things at least a little.) We can't un-invent the transistor.
> wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever.
True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire. Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks.
People who never aspire to such professions might be spared long working years, but some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.
> True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire.
Oh I agree.
In the absence of a profit motive those fields would be taken up by the most dedicated, eh?
> Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks.
Again I agree. I think that one obvious benefit of automation is that it frees up humans for important things that only humans can do. Mark Miller has an adage "Moore's law means that humans are becoming exponentially more valuable from the CPU's POV."
We're not talking about forcing people to retire after two years. We're talking about eliminating drudgery and wasteful processes.
> some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.
No, that's the whole point: no one has to put in long hours anymore thanks to the knock-on effects of the invention of the transistor.
Just like farming went from ~90% of the population to ~3%, so will our industrial space-age civilization, if we let it.
I don't see what high horse you are talking about. The point is that having to work in order to survive is not inherently a desirable situation for a human to be in. A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on. Historically such a life has been possible for a select few in the aristocracy, and they seem to have had a great time - usually at the expense of serfs, slaves or other less privileged classes. Hopefully, eventually we'll all be able to live a life like that, with robots or software instead of slaves. So when someone says that we shouldn't consider jobs to be inherently valuable, they are pointing out that what is valuable is not our labor, but the fruit of our labor. That we should seek to improve results rather than effort. 150 years ago, ~70% of the population in western countries needed to work in agriculture to ensure the food supply - today it's less than 5%, and that's great! So yes, currently human work is still needed to keep society running, and for that reason we have created social norms around it being ethical to work and unethical not to, in order to get everyone to pitch in. But the truth is that there is nothing inherently unethical about not working, as long is it's not at the expense of someone else having to work even harder. As such, if you want to put on the tin-foil-hat a bit, you might even consider that it could be that the class that already lives a life where they don't need to work - the upper class (who make their living by owning things) has over-sold this whole notion of 'work == good' to the middle class (who make their living by working) in order for them to feel better than the lower class (who are unemployed) and ensure any anger is directed downward and those two classes will fight it out instead of questioning the world order.
> A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on.
What you are describing is already a reality for our house pets. I don't find becoming a house pet to some AI/automated machine to be desirable in any way shape or form.
Hey, there's no need to resort to name calling. You didn't address my main point, but instead just put up a strawman argument by equating the autonomy of not needing to work with the massive lack of autonomy that comes from being someone's pet, a perspective that my comment had already given a counterexample of with the aristocracy. So yes, I called out your comment for being a one-line, low effort, strawman argument, that didn't actually add to the debate by 1) actually addressing any of the points raised or 2) seriously making and backing up any points of its own. If you have something substantive to add, or any actual counterarguments, I'd genuinely love to hear them.
If I had a job I might not want to continue if it was undesirable, if it was desirable I would continue anyway.
If I didn't have a job I would still like my basic needs covered (living in a country with good social security means that that would actually be so), and if nobody else had to pick up my slack I'd want more than the basics.
And then I want that for everyone. Any of the situations given above is true for someone in my surroundings, colleagues, friends, neighbors.
My perspective is coloured by the country I live in of course. Nobody will be on the street, hungry or without healthcare if they lose their job here, there is plenty of annual leave by law. And it's great, I gladly pay taxes for that. But imagine, it could be even better!
I don't think anyone inherently needs what we think of as jobs. What we actually need is a way to provide for our own and our families' livelihoods, and the currently in-fashion way to do this is with "jobs".
If everyone were magically able to live without jobs, some would still go off and do things productive out of an innate desire to be productive, but many wouldn't.
Try say this to someone without a job though? Because I'm pretty sure in this utopian idea of "I don't need a job because my basic needs will be met" is complete fantasy in 2020.
Millions have recently lost their jobs so I'm sure its' easy enough to find someone who can tell you how it feels.
What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements? Is it the political equivalent of unobtanium or vaporware?
Im not trying to be a smartass; I want to know what the answer might look like. It doesn’t have to be a treatise. Just something consistent with a chance at succeeding with non-ideal people.
> What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements?
Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.
Different political systems/policies combined with capitalism can produce very different societies and structures. For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.
> Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.
“Capitalism” is not a full description of a national political system, but since it is fundamentally a system of legal property relations, it is exactly an aspect of a political system.
> For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.
Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist but one of many forms of post-capitalist mixed-economy systems which retain elements of capitalist property relations but constrain them in various ways foreign to capitalism in the strict sense.
>Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist
But then would it also not be fair to consider the US to also be such a mixed system. Not as equally mixed, but still mixed with behaviors that are post-capitalist?
>Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.
It is you need a giant violent state to create a culture of sophisticated property rights. AKA capitalism requires a state and legal system, it doesn't exist without one. Things like copyright and Intellectual property are pure man made cultural political fictions, they do not exist in the natural animal kingdom.
How is it possible to own large tracts of land the size of small cities or entire provinces without a state/army to enforce it? AKA before populations got big there was plenty of "common" land that wasn't anyones. Property rights are a cultural invention.
Capitalism is the default system that evolves organically when free men and women create things of value and voluntarily exchange them with others. That's not to say it's perfect or 100% fair.
That's why you always hear communists and socialists talk about the need for a "revolution". No one ever talks about a capitalist revolution because people don't need to be coerced into voluntarily exchanging goods and services. They do, however, need to be coerced into giving up their wealth to some massive state who's self-appointed role is to decide "what's fair" and who does and does not get to receive wealth produced by others.
They may well be instances where the hard edges of capitalism need to be sanded down a bit with redistributive policies, but make no mistake, between socialism and capitalism, socialism requires a lot more force, state-backed violence, and coercion to make work.
Most countries run on fiat to exchange wealth. Fiat already takes a huge leap of faith in the state issuing it. To think that the current economy is anything like barter is bogus. There is too much blind trust that the current economy is more fair than not, which leads to "fiat wealth" = "human worth" thinking, while money leaks like a sieve to entrenched interests.
If you're saying that there isn't a "pure capitalist" system in existence today, that's true. I think we mostly agree in our points, even if we're coming at it a bit differently. Crony capitalism, as practiced in most developed countries today, shares a lot of the same bad outcomes seen in socialist systems. Namely, you have a large state with a monopoly on violence, using its considerable power to pick winners and losers, often in a way that is not based on the value created by groups or individuals, but rather the political power and influence of those groups or individuals.
The answer to this is not to double down and give the state even more power to pick winners and losers, thinking that "this time will be different" or "we just need to get the smartest most moral people into power".
Barter is "natural", but so is tribalism/centralized governance, and monopolistic practices. Yes, it does have to be "we'll do it better/smarter this time" for both governance and the market-based economy(not "free market"). Thinking that dismantling it all and allowing "free" organic growth won't lead right back entrenched interests and gatekeepers within the government and market is naive.
I rather think that feudalism is the default system. Power begets power, so in the absence of some sort of check on runaway power accumulation i.e. a government, "free markets" are quickly replaced by "do what I say or I'll have my minions kill you".
This is like a whole giant blob of assumptions and cultural bias. The only thing thats natural is law of the jungle, and the wish of the strongest. Otherwise known as the monarchy.
No need for a capitalist revolution? Did the monarchy give up power willingly? The french revolution, the american revolution, etc.
The only 'freedom' that exists in the natural world is the law of the jungle. You want freedom but want to live in a society?
The idea of police and public prosecution, of justice and judges are all recent inventions. Without them, what stops me from taking whatever is yours and assures your freedom. How do you even come into possesion of land, water or any resource in the natural world?
Apparently some people's idea of freedom means they can wonder around the city spreading deadly disease. I would very much like freedom from them coughing in my vicinity and infecting me.
Some people think they have freedom to shoot me in the face if they feel 'scared', while i value freedom from getting shot.
Some people believ they have freedom to pollute the air with sulphur oxide, while i believe they should have to pay the cost it takes to clean up their pollution.
Any freedom for you is an obligation on me, and vice versa.
I don't think I ever claimed that the U.S. in it's current form is a pure capitalist system (or even close to it) and I think you're deliberately taking the first sentence of my comment out of context.
That being said, I don't think we're disagreeing here or at least not entirely. I'm saying that the state can't be trusted to manage the economy and distribution of wealth because it is prone to corruption and favoritism leading to bad outcomes. You seem to be arguing a similar point.
As long as people have to do things with land and resources there has to be a way to enforce use.
It’s not like collectivism or communism or anything else allows interlopers to seize things willy nilly.
Peasants in Cuba or the Soviet Union couldn’t just squat on land and do as they pleased. The kulaks are a good testament to what happens in those circumstances.
We have that thing in Europe called socialism, it brought us paid vacations, public health care, paid parental leaves, paid sick leaves, less working hours, &c. In a way all these things are wealth redistribution.
It's actually funny to listen to political debates of the 60s and 70s because people were planning that if automation were properly handled we'd be working like 2 days a week while keeping our standards of life and retiring at 40. What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c.
By the way, you might want to reassess your way of starting conversations, you're definitely trying to be a smartass. There are answers all over the place if you're willing to search/read a bit, it's not like these societal issues are new, there are literally hundreds of books about this very topic.
> A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working class support that might otherwise go to his Socialist enemies.
European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. And regardless, income inequality is also a problem in Europe.
The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one. Adding a bit more wealth distribution just means tweaking the system, rather than creating a new one, which is what the parent poster implied was needed.
Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
> European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism.
It is, but it's also very heavily influenced by socialism. You, and many other people, seem to believe it's and "either or" question when it really isn't and it never has been...
> The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one
What does that even mean ? the current "one" ? Since when there is only one ? Just compare the US and French or German systems they're extremely different, especially for the average workers.
> rather than creating a new one
Come on, we're not talking JS frameworks here, what kind of rhetoric is that. Nobody is talking about tearing down the whole thing and starting from scratch.
> Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
Everything I can find talks about rising retirement age, lowering of pensions, and stagnation of purchasing power. If automation really brought what it was supposed to bring we would see much deeper _positive_ changes when comparing 1970s and 2020s. People got kicked out of factories and pushed into the tertiary sector but for all intent and purpose it's the same shitty working conditions, wages and social statuses. The guy who built cars for ford in the 50s is now driving a uber and has to pay his own insurances and pension, talk about the automation revolution ...
European society is based on rule of law, democracy, equality, the scientific method, the justice system, free public education and capitalism.
Capitalism existed for thousands of years (first company if the world was registered like yr. 700) and only supported miserable living standards. Most of these systems appears during / after the Renaissance, and deserve more credit for the society we have today than capitalism does
While I would agree they were very unlikely to have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, how does one draw the same conclusion about communism? I've met plenty of people who see communism, or at least a system of government that they would ascribe that label to even if others might not, as being a preferable alternative to capitalism. This leads me to think it is a reasonable assumption that they might have been thinking about communism, even if it is not the only possible reasonable assumption.
Not that it actually matters for the discussion, just for transparency - I am pretty open about the method.
As long as we all get to do less of the undesirable work, our needs are covered and the profits and power of automation are not concentrated in the hands of a few I'd say we reached the goal. 'Evenish' distribution might be sufficient too.
There is a lot of literature on ideas and theories about it. The systems used so far had a lot of debugging time already, and I'd expect unexpected effects to turn up when implementing anything new, and thus it is hard to advocate for any specific one. Working with our problematic traits (such as laziness, selfishness and hunger for power) instead of against them (or worse, ignoring them) seems advisable though.
Desirability is defined by the consequences the success brings, as opposed to the failure of inaction. It is a thing only in context of some unfulfilled needs.
How do you define desirability in the society where "needs are covered" (already)?
What would comprise the desirability if the profit of every action is alienated from the acting person?
Not all needs can just be covered by the economy, of course. You cannot make people respect or love someone.
I was talking purely about basic physical needs such as enough varied good food and decent shelter.
As your link says, 'Man is a perpetually wanting animal.'
I would say a desirable job is one with
- mostly pleasant tasks,
- good working conditions (not hard on the body (heavy lifting and bad positions, no natural light, noisy, bad air quality, ..) and mind (bad stress, bad social fit, ..),
- good relationships with the people around you, (and the ability to leave if they don't work for you)
- a good amount of agency (where 'good' might differ from person to person),
- achievable and worthwhile goals that do not feel like 'bullshit work', with a good feedback loop,
- and probably more I cannot think of off the top of my head right now.
(Respect and reward of other people is definitively a big plus, but if you yourself think your job is worthwhile it's probably enough to count as desirable.)
Most of these are not material rewards (though not having them can increase profit). If the only reason somebody does a specific job at all is money, the above conditions are not met/the person is not actively happy about doing it, and it can be done by a machine just as easily, I say we shouldn't have a need for this person to do it. Still, current society demands people have a job, any job, or even several, as a value in itself.
How the profit from work done is distributed is whole other (but connected) story. (Concerning your last question, I would argue that this disconnect to profit is already the case for many many people.)
Sorry for not writing clearly, this topic would probably warrant a seminar with lots of beer and reading at least.
Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end.
The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation.
It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when talking about redistribution as a solve, that for every Sweden or Denmark, there's a Cuba or North Korea.
So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live?
There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great?
Maybe thats the key differentiator?
Has communism been able to exist outside dictatorships? Or has it been unlucky in that regard and always attracted authoritarianism.
I guess the question would be, if given a chance to choose would people living in those regimes keep the economic system and reform government or would they vote for a different kind of system altogether?
Communism has never existed at all, lets start there.
Whether the dictators where honestly trying to create communism, or they were using it to fool the populace much the same as monarchs used religion, is debatable.
It appears that from their minutes and other notes and such that Soviet leaders truly believed what they were doing was communism. It wasn’t a case of them pretending and then in secret they’d laugh at the sham they were executing. No, they truly believed they were being marxists.
Capitalist countries can be free and open democracies or they can be brutal dictatorships, but they at least have a path to a free society if they so choose it.
A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.
There is no modern state without collectively funded education, police, fire service, justice system, military, reseach, environmental protection, FDA,FAA, etc.
So where is this magical line, once we cross it, the system suddently becomes oppressive?
If that's the magic line, then it's a thousand miles away.
I can't find a single country (maybe North Korea?) still in existence, that has outlawed private business. We aren't just talking social democracy, even Cuba and Venesuela allow private business.
The examples you have given, have indeed outlawed many private businesses, in the past. Although, I agree that those countries have become significantly more capitalistic over the years.
You also skipped the most famous example of socialism, which was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union absolutely banned almost all forms of private enterprise.
But sure, socialism has significantly decreased in relevancy over the last few decades, to the point where basically all old socialist countries are becoming more and more capitalistic. Socialism is dying, all throughout the world.
Also _when_ socialistic government allow some controlled capitalism (usually heavily regulated-meaning it applies to small business and not just your sulfur emoting power plants), they do it as a temporary concession on the way to complete abolition of private business.
Before Stalin forced the kulaks out of their farms Lenin allowed private farming as a means to an end. Stalin lost patience and forced it.
> Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".
> Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.
No, it's not. Private businesses executed through private labor applied to public capital which the business rents from the state are perfectly compatible with socialism in which private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.
It's true that there are “socialist” states and parties that have banned or sought to ban private business, but that's not essential to socialism.
Also, all of those collectively funded services listed upthread tend to feature public capital ownership of the means of delivering the service as well as public operating funds, and often exclude private ownership of some of the means of delivering those services and/or use of privately owned capital to provide the same service, resulting in a domain in which private capital ownership is restricted.
> private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.
This is a borderline semantic argument.
There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.
Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital. And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.
Yes, code is capital. The value of almost all software companies, is not in the server racks, it is in the code that they produced.
As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital, and now that capital would be illegal for them to own, even if they produced it.
> And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.
Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone, noone is coming for your code. Every half-sensible discussion of modern socialism is not about taking away all of your stuff. I am really tired of this bait and switch social democracy for communism.
Einstein, Heinzenberg and many other scientists have advanced the whole human race, but you can't have IP on ideas and on laws of nature, and on scientific theories.
So have they produced capital?
The discussion of IP is very nuanced, and raises question for why code is covered by overlapping patents and copyright, how long it should last, what rights does end user have and how right to repair is affected, etc.
Anyway, this thread has been massively derailed. It started with a bizzare slippery slope argument of "for every Finland there is a North Korea" as if social democracies are in danger of turning totalitarian any day.
> Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone
Correct, that is kind of my point. Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era. That does not change the definition of what "The means of production" are though.
I am not too worried about socialists taking over. They lost, and aren't going to take back the means of production from anyone.
> is not about taking away all of your stuff
Well yeah. That is because they are no longer relevant, because of how significantly they lost, and because of how much capitalism has become the defacto government system, all around the world, even in many places that used to call themselves socialist.
If socialists want to redefine socialism to be actually be just capitalism, but with a slightly more expansive social safety net, with more free healthcare and government programs, I guess that is fine by me.
> Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era.
Leninists and their descendants might be; socialists aren't any more than capitalists are, as pretty much every advanced economy is some hybrid of the two. Because of the Cold War (by which point that was already largely true), it's become fashionable to call those mixed economies “capitalist”, that is not particularly accurate (though it comports well with Leninist propaganda.)
The capitalist state you are celebrating is grafting on increasingly more socialist elements. Stop thinking about the cold war and start thinking about the past 200 years.
There didn't use to be public education, police, justice system, etc. This trend is going to continue.
I already said that if you want to redefine socialism as to be capitalism with a slightly bigger safety net, and some government funding of education/healthcare you can do that.
But I am not going to call that socialism.
That's just capitalism, with a slightly larger safety net.
You are expanding the definition of capitalism. Why is that expansion to be preferred over what you call expanding the definition of socialism? Especially since socialists defined both?
Sure, so I can explain why my definition is better, using an example that you gave.
You said that a reasonable definition of socialism was the following: "means you can't own those goods while renting labor"
This situation, is so far removed, so far out there, so far significantly different than the current state of the world, that it makes no sense at all to call the current state of the world "socialist".
The situation you gave, is far, far outside the norm of how the world currently works, and is borderline unimaginable as to how such a society would even look like.
But my situation, of "Capitalism countries put more money into existing social safety net programs" is easily immaginable. It require no restructuring of society. It merely requires a bit more money, being put into existing programs.
Or in other words, not much would change.
Wheras making it so "you can't own those goods while renting labor" would mean that basically every major company in the world would have to be shutdown or restructured. It is such a massive change, that I cannot even begin to guess as to what such a world would look like.
If you want to make up a new word, or something, that describes giving a bit more money to existing social safety net programs, go ahead.
But whatever you decide to call it, please do not pretend that it is any way similar to if people "can't own those goods while renting labor". The situations are so extremely different, that it makes no sense to describe them using the same word.
There's no borderline, once the issue was raised of, to paraphrase “what does the term ‘socialism’ encompass”, the discussion was inherently one of semantics.
But that hardly invalidates a response once the term of the discussion are set.
> There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.
There's a very big difference, especially in the way socialists (who established the term) define “capital” (the definition is used in finance within capitalist societies is broader, expanding the original by metaphor, and useful for its purpose within capitalist societies, but it's not what socialists seek to abolisg. The socialist use is strictly limited to the physical, non-financial means of production.)
> Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital.
No, you didn't, as socialists define the term (whether or not private ownership of IP is recognized—on which socialist preferences may vary—IP is not capital in the socialist sense, being decidedly non-physical.)
> As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital.
Again, no, what in capitalists societies are called “capital goods” are not capital in the socialist sense until and except as they are used as means of production. Socialism doesn't mean you can't own capital goods, it means you can't own those goods while renting labor to apply to them in the course of production (and many schools of socialism have a principled carve out for means of production to which the owners own labor exclusively is applied, the prohibition is most centrally about the separated relationship between labor and capital, which does not exist in that case.)
And this is all strict-sense socialism, which much modern developed-world socialism is decidedly not, being largely instead mixed economy ideology with a preference for more restraints on the power of capital owners over others in society than the dominant status quo in modern mixed economies. Your precious code and capital goods are even more safe there.
> means you can't own those goods while renting labor
And this is only slightly different than banning all private enterprises.
I do not consider "you can own some capital, but only if you are a single person, and you can't purchase labor from others for your business" to be significantly different than the slightly more extreme situation of banning all private enterprises.
FWIW my takeaway is that underfunding a whole class of people, especially when it comes to education and healthcare, so they have a much harder time succeeding in the job market and tend to die or go bankrupt if they get sick, is a really bad idea.
Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent it being taken from them, even if it's only particularly large because there's a big market to sell into and a big winner effect in the market structure.
I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum is an actively harmful frame for constructing a society with fulfilling lives and less inequality. Neither more government nor more free enterprise is quite right.
People want to live productive lives where they are valued and make a difference. How do you do that in a society which has such enormous returns on capital which alienates people from their work product?
If unearned income is unfulfilling, we should raise the estate tax, why should the children of the poor be so blessed to need to work while the children of millionaires and billionaires be saddled with the curse of ennui?
You might think you're being facetious, but many wealthy people don't want their children's lives to be wasted on consumption, and so limit their inheritance: enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.
The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people - not necessarily for money, but for other people.
I'd love if we could try and figure out a social, institutional, structural technology which doesn't require taxes (and thus politics and government) for this. Government slowly but surely gets captured by people with the biggest pockets, until populists take over and everything falls apart with simple wrong answers, or worse, kleptocracy.
>The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people
Exactly. So we should set up a system that provides everyone with enough to meet their basic needs.
That way they can spend their time and effort to find the way they can most effectively do things for other people rather than finding the local maxima "job I can tolerate that keeps me alive"
I don't personally buy this. If prices were the most efficient way of determining what we should do for other people, why does the government already subsidize certain medications? Or agriculture? Or public development/education? College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I believe.
The core problem is that at the end of the day no one has to play nice. So we have to have government to set rules about ownership (among other things). But then some entity has to be in charge of government, which means they are actually in charge of allocating ownership. At current our only options consist of some structure made of humans, and even the best among these are corruptible. As such people who have power to corrupt this process (which is to say own the resources necessary to corrupt the process) can do so in an attempt to increase their own ownership. One example is political advertising to push an agenda that is likely to be more profitable. Be this a brick maker getting an agreement to have the new town hall made using bricks, or be this colleges having their customers being given access to large amounts of financing so they can raise their prices.
>College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I believe.
Or is college education becoming more expensive because government has allowed for loans that can't be discharged to be given to people who have been given a false sense of the value college provides. This in turn means there is more demand (including the ability to actually purchase the desired product) for a product that isn't always worth it, increasing price?
One last consideration. Being the most efficient doesn't mean it is as efficient as one could theorize, only that it is more efficient than any alternative that can be put into practice.
Unearned income is unfulfilling in the context of a default assumption that the ability to earn an income is a valid measure of worth. There are other, better, measures.
Making something that other people are willing to reward with the fruits of their own labour is about as honest a social measure of worth as you can get outside of friends and family.
It's also not something that would be taken away by diverting excess productivity to covering people's basic needs. I can at least imagine a world where doing so spurs a renaissance of creativity and entrepreneurship, because, just like you said, people seem to have an innate need to try and do something productive with their time.
If there's a real social fear that I hold, it's that we'd suddenly have supply problems in certain segments of the labor market. I know I, for one, would never have taken that 2nd shift job working in the kitchen of an all night diner if I hadn't needed the money to buy food. I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead.
"I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead." Then this takes off, makes you money, and you are higher class than those who keep their skills "for fun"
EDIT: Not sure if this was understood, this was meant on a commentary on how capitalism and class can find its why back into such a system
Given the idea I had at the time, probably not. But I'd like to think it would have enriched the lives of myself and others, all the same.
In broad strokes, I'm more capitalist than communist, so I don't really disagree with the whole "greed is good" thing. Where I part ways is the unstated - often, I suspect, un-recognized - premise that it's the only good. Money's only useful for what it can buy, and its value has been artificially inflated by a social structure that makes it something that you just can't live without.
> Money's only useful for what it can buy, and its value has been artificially inflated by a social structure that makes it something that you just can't live without.
That's a good point. And makes me think of videogames analogy, particularly MMORPG.
In a typical MMO, you need to labor to earn money (known as "grinding") to buy all the stuff you'll need to make progress easier (and/or possible). But at any time, you can just stop, take time off, go explore the places you've been to (i.e. not containing enemies stronger than you can beat), or even just log out and leave your character be for a week. You lose nothing except time and perhaps your rank in some completely optional competition with other players. But your character won't go hungry, won't starve or freeze to death, won't be evicted for not paying taxes.
That illustrates the difference between money being useful, versus being necessary. And even if it's only useful and not necessary, that doesn't mean you won't be motivated to earn it - you will want more money if the things you can buy with it are interesting enough.
Yes, and that metric is distorted out of all utility by the necessity of maximizing the specifically monetary value of labor, as a condition of survival and stability - and even then, those are frighteningly contingent if they're achievable at all.
If something is enjoyable and rewarding, like making art or an invention, I'd want to do it myself. If a job is unenjoyable and unrewarding, I will use the fruits of my labors to get someone else to do it. I will pay a lot of money to whoever cleans my septic tank. Does that make septic tank cleaners socially valuable, or does that make having a clean septic tank valuable? If a machine can clean the septic tank and no one has to do that task anymore, then I can get what I want without either having to toil myself or convincing someone else to toil.
> Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent it being taken from them
This seems like an easy explanation striped of nuance that really needs some data backing it. How is it different from resentment from people who earned it by working? Why is it unfulfilling - is it only because of comparison to others, or is it common even for UBI? Is it specific to feelings about income, but balanced out by easier life, or is it a significant decrease in satisfaction overall?
Things become more fulfilling when you see everyone else doing them, such as raising kids.
There are so many things people could be doing which are not compensated by the market and corporations. “Leaning in and earning $1 instead of 70c” is a meme that corporations use to get more humans to trade quality time with parents and kids for them. [1] Why don’t we ask about “Leaning out and spending more time with our families?” [2]
Open source
Science
Philosophy
Family
Personal development
Volunteering in community
You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all. That’s why many in NYC lamented when Amazon was not given tax breaks to come to our city. It’s almost as if we need Bezos’ company to organize ourselves an our time so we can get paid the money.
Society spends tons on fossil fuels and commuting and for what? To sit in a chair 30 miles away?
Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. We can't live at our current standards with artisan search engines, hand-crafted phones and home-made cars. But the same scale which enables modern living alienates workers from their labour. In most companies, all but a select few at the top have very little agency. They mostly get told what to do and they often don't even see the customer that benefits from the value they create. And the people with agency at the top get the vast majority of the profits.
The result is a society with a lot of inequality and poverty, and a mass of alienated consumers trying to purchase those things which are missing in their lives: narrative, stories which connect their consumption with humanity. Hand-made this, small batch that, experiences you can share with other people., the personal touches which weave a life into a broader more meaningful tapestry.
And raising children, of course. But that's somewhat bitter-sweet, knowing the world they're going out into, unless you have some assurance they're going to be among those with agency.
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I'm struck that your objection to having been "conditioned" is immediately followed by a paragraph affirming the content of the supposed "conditioning".
> > You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all.
Emphasis added.
> Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. ...
I want to point out in this connection that advertising (commercial propaganda) is ubiquitous in most modern societies, and IMO counts as "conditioning".
It is objectively true (is, not ought) that in the world we currently live in, large orgs enable scale which enables modern living.
It does not follow that I think that's the way things ought to be. That's how I interpret the "better" in EGreg's comment, because this conversation is about how we can live a better lives, not how to maximize efficiency. But we can only talk about oughts in the context of what can be.
What I'd like - as I've mentioned in another comment here - is some kind of organizational technology which enables the same efficiencies as large orgs, but without the alienation of labour.
Also, FWIW, I'm hoping that automation frees up enough time to be able to support "consensus driven" governance, which is I suspect is theoretically optimal, but it's really expensive:
What are you organizing around Mr. Chief Architect? Your company does data visualization for financial firms. Financial firms that don't have a loss condition. How many extrapolations from reality is your business? At least 2, maybe 3, more? As long as the markets your pretty pictures represent can't take a loss - you're only justifying your undeserved opulence. Every bail out absolves people like you from their failure, and denies people like me a better opportunity to out perform you.
Have the labor classes of the U.S. seen any advancement in the last few decades? Are the advances the labor classes of other (US/India) even worthwhile given the lack of political bargaining power?
You economically depress local workers, and sell them on their freedoms and in then in the next breath you're politically oppressing foreign labor classes while selling them on their economic advances. Both are true, but you take the larger margin from both.
Corporations aren’t the best way to organize things. They are good, but have been outcompeted by decentralized systems with small owner-contributors and no ownership of the platform.
LiveJournal vs Wordpress
AOL vs The Web
Britannica vs Wikipedia
I could go on and on. Science, Open Source, Creative Commons allows collaboration instead of a top-down approach, and has been wildly successful.
In the past, we needed centralized manufacturing, centralized telephone operators etc. No longerz
Wordpress -> Facebook -> Instagram etc.; what goes around comes around.
AOL -> Web -> Google AMP etc.
Wikipedia has its editors and its petty squabbles, and worse, its ever increasing budgets (for what, exactly?) funded by guilt-based extortion from the masses, a bunch of parasites feeding on public contributions.
Once a hill has appeared from the bottom up, climbers crawl out of their holes, clamber up and try and steer from the top. And they usually succeed.
On the contrary, when you have only a few large companies, they form oligopolies, there is no competition, free market does not function and the consumer looses out.
Tangential note - I've always found the idiom "job creation" weird and illogical. It seems to be US specific AFAIK. You don't create anything when you decide to exchange money for labor.
Makes sense to me. While there's practically an infinite amount of things that society would like to be done, it's not so easy to turn them into jobs. The exchange of money for labor is constrained from both sides - on the employee side, the job has to provide enough money for the worker to be able to live off it. On the employer side, most jobs only exist if the output of those jobs can be used to make even more money than it took to pay for it. This applies recursively.
In the end, the number of actual jobs available is very limited, and it's not so illogical to call the act of making such money/labor exchange possible as "job creation".
Well we could allocate the stocks equally to everyone if we wanted to work with that idea. I'm not sure what to do with the stock market in that scenario though. Maybe we can reallocate annually?
And how many restaurants now have online ordering who would never have had online ordering without being forced to?
However, even before Covid, McDonald's was rolling out touchscreen kiosk and app ordering. So, there has definitely been automation in that sector.
The paper is ... kinda odd ... because its methodology considers machine operators (injection molding machine operators, lathe and machining center operators, etc.) to be some of the most automatable. That's a pretty laughable idea to anyone who has tried to run one of those machines.
Yeah, 20 hours of training got me to the point I can run a CNC mill. However, I wouldn't say I'm good at it. I touch off incorrectly probably 1 in 20 times--which likely blows a part and breaks an end mill. I sometimes don't leave enough clearance to the vice jaws--which certainly breaks a mill and possible damages the machine itself.
I think it was NYC CNC on YouTube that had a whole video of the various fails he's had with CNC milling machines over time. Anyone who has used a CNC cringes at that video because we have all done exactly the same things.
> That's a pretty laughable idea to anyone who has tried to run one of those machines.
That’s not laughable in the slightest to anyone who knows history of machining. There are fewer and fewer machine shops, and at the same time the machining centers are becoming more and more sophisticated. Sure, operating CNC mills requires significant expertise, but so did manual machining. We used to have hundreds of thousands of machinists in this country, making various parts for cars, household appliances etc. Now it’s all factory made. Just because some existing process requires expertise, doesn’t mean that we cannot come up with a new process that will not need that skilled operator as a step.
> Just because some existing process requires expertise, doesn’t mean that we cannot come up with a new process that will not need that skilled operator as a step.
However, completely wiping out a process (replacing sheet metal fabrication with plastics) is not particularly "automation" of said process. You've just changed where the expertise is rather than automated it away.
Replacing injection molding machine operators with 3D printing machine operators is automation because it makes some people go away/requires less expertise.
This kind of thing happens all the time; a crisis in economic terms forcing companies to aggressively pursue cost savings measures that never go away once the economic constraints are lifted. A similar process happened with oil rigs, where automation was available, but only pursued once the price of oil crashed. Those jobs also never came back.
During the last crash, in 2008, my employer at the time, Aspera (since bought out by IBM), boomed as customers moved to cut costs.
The customers replaced shipping disk drives (or, in DoD's case, boxes of analog videotapes!) with transferring files over fiber and satellite links. NYT switched from reading stories aloud over bad phone connections to transferring files via satphone.
This displaced fedex package handlers and mailroom personnel, and stenographers.
In DoD's case, a physical library of surveillance drone videotapes, and everybody schlepping tape cartridges, was replaced with a remote-accessible video library. Nowadays digital video is streamed to Nevada and Utah in real time, and copied off there.
Similar stories apply for numerous other customer industries. These were all permanent changes. Aspera grew to a hundred-some employees in 2014, but must have displaced thousands.
My current employer had a curiously very successful corona-quarter and building a solid backorder because we cannot have everyone in production right now.
We automate everything we can and still employ more and more people. We often think manufacturing when speaking about automation, but I think administration will be affected most (you won't automate anything if you fired your internal IT department).
We also build a fairly sci-fi robot to populate circuit boards for parts that cannot be fitted by reflow soldering. Great device to show off but the soldering women are just plainly faster and less error prone. And we have quite a high wage level.
But sales planning, accounting, reporting will be mostly automated at some point. Our own in-house production is steadily growing even with additional support by machines.
Of course it is bad if people out of job have no alternative. I think there should be state support for such cases instead of artificially keeping an industry alive.
Administration has always been hit very hard. People don’t remember, but in the 1950s offices regularly had dozens of people who’s only job was calculating things and drafting charts and reports. In some domains they were literally called “computers”, since “compute” has a meaning prior to the electronic computers we now know.
All of these jobs were replaced by a spreadsheet decades ago.
To be fair, "the centre of the distribution catching up" is exactly the fear that the article is criticising. The fear isn't that one company is going to make some huge leap in AI - it's more about what happens if that leap gets adopted en-masse by the whole economy.
Sort of. We do have unique problems to solve given the nature of our products. But to some degree, you are correct. We would have eventually done it to scale, but right now we did it to survive.
A similar thing happened post 2001-bubble-pop and post 2008.
Post 2001, there was a huge shift to offshore models, ticketing-workflow models, and a shift to a blossoming open source environment.
Post 2008, there was another huge shift to more flexible infrastructure models, and to automation.
Companies are often reluctant to restructure workforces, even when there are potential efficiencies available. Economic crises provide an "opportunity" for them to right-size.
An independent line of evidence looks at the formation of new occupations over time.
If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics's.
This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last several years, for instance.
But, and this is the point, this "job churn" been happening more slowly over the last 20 years than at any time since WW II.
That is also incompatible with the claim that an automation revolution is under way.
> "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last several years, for instance.
How many people worked on assembly lines in, say, 1910 vs. 2010? How about as a percentage of an average manufacturer's staff?
How many people worked as social media managers in 2010?
I'd bet that (adjusted for population growth) for every 100 assembly line workers in 1910 you now have 2-3 stressed out engineers plus a bunch of machinery. And maybe one social media manager every few companies.
Sure, but somehow the total number of jobs has still managed to increase from 1910 to 2010. Automation shifts the work humans do. So far, it hasn't replaced the need for humans to do work, or we'd have a shrinking job market, which we didn't have prior to Covid (a temporary situation).
If you track the rise of administrative staff from 1990 to 2020, you see a massive increase. For example, HBR posted that healthcare jobs grew by a total 75% from 1990-2012, and that 95% of that growth was non-medical staff.
This growth doesn't really have anything to do with necessary work. It has to do with how incentives function for management.
We do not and have never had an economy where everyone is needed for production. In economics, as the marginal increase in utility for a worker goes down you would think that there would be less workers hired, or at least they would be more evaluated prior to hiring. That doesn't take into account the competing incentives of middle and upper management who have no real incentive to increase production efficiency or where that incentive isn't properly balanced against the social and internal gain from having a larger budget and staff within an organization.
If you have the ability to hire and gain from hiring people more than you lose from their work being totally unnecessary, you hire. It's not your money you're wasting. Afterwards, you or your new hires will create systems of increasing complexity to justify the continued employment and hiring of new workers.
Wages for the bottom 3 quintiles have been stagnating or growing well below those of the top quintile for decades. It is because they have lost their ability to negotiate for higher wages, due to an unfavorable shift in demand and supply curves.
They are contending with additional supply of labor from other countries where people are willing to work for less. In addition, software and the ability to scale at zero cost has made people more productive, so one person can do much more than before. And it also leads to big companies getting even bigger meaning people only have a few employers to choose from.
This change also happens at a faster rate than before in history, so while in decades past, technology obviate people slowly enough that they were able to retrain and do other things, now it could be moving too fast for people to retrain (or perhaps they’re simply not capable of learning the new task).
The human population and therefore the size of the market has also increased rather a lot in that time. The overall size of the job market isn't shrinking, but what's the median share per worker?
Also we shouldn't discount the various sophistries used to manipulate the unemployment rate. Many, many people aren't counted as 'unemployed' when they probably should be, because either they aren't applying for jobs, or they get occasional casual or gig work.
Indeed, productivity growth is actually lower than in the past, so we're actually in a phase of slower automation. I think one thing that doesn't get considered enough is the viewpoint that we're currently in a post-automation revolution world. We generated a lot of excess capacity and weren't able to funnel it to productive uses, hence the rise of many things we see discussed here like "bullshit jobs," excessive administration, zero-sum industries, parasitic industries getting people to buy things they don't need, etc. My guess is that increases in automation won't eliminate jobs but will just further exacerbate these issues, unless there are some sort of societal changes.
It's funny that productivity growth is a sign of slowing automation, when it's not actually about growth in productivity as much as it is about the consolidation of capital in fewer hands and lower continued expenses.
The real messed up part is that expenses don't actually have to have gone down - you could have a smaller number of people charging the company a lot more and siphoning off money to do the same work because they don't actually run a company based on efficient production and engineering standards, they run a piggy bank. A lot of those went bankrupt in 2008 and were bailed out by the government. More are on the brink and being bailed out now.
The assumption that job titles reflect critical features of the job, or aspects of automation impacting the workforce, is...laughably easily falsifiable.
What about the replacement of W-2 with 1099 task-oriented roles? Where does that show up in the job title data set?
The 2M Uber drivers, just in the US?
The tens of millions of jobs offshored that no longer show up in US surveys?
That requirements for the job of a CEO now generally include technology...?
A piece contemporaneously on the HN front page? The "job" this person could have had 10 years ago still exists under the same title, but they are no longer qualified for it.
With all respect to Robin Hanson, his distilled claim is, to use his term, "bullshit."
It would be good for him to be subjected to automation of his job, then he might develop an understanding of the dimensions of the situation beyond the limits of the data he's myopically studying.
Also let's not forget that automation still means someone needs to write some code, which needs to be written, maintained, updated, synced with other projects etc. The act itself creates new jobs already.
For instance: In IT we also have this. Dev is the typical product development team, Ops is the team that takes care of keeping the lights on. Now with all the automation we have a new job called Devops which is somewhat in the middle betwen both Dev and Ops. We thought both groups would move to the middle and form this new Devops group. But what most companies did is completely hire from zero for their Devops teams.
Now what we see is that Devops is growing, while Dev and Ops are shrinking. But the sum of both shrinking groups is smaller than the sum of new Devops jobs.
Automation is generally done due to cost savings. So if you replace a thousand jobs, then you pay for automation less than you paid for these thousand jobs, so obviously there's less than thousand people involved in creating and maintaining and selling that automation. And if the automated jobs are low-paying jobs and the "automators" are mostly highly-paid engineers, then the gap is even larger.
If there's an engineer paid $200k + overhead for working on automation, then that only can happen if his/her job alone results in automating away ten $30k jobs.
It creates new job opportunities for those that can train for them. The open questions are always: will automation create enough, higher-skilled and better paying jobs than the ones it will substitute? How does a society re-train the newly jobless to perform more productive tasks that require higher/different skills?
Of course that given enough time the labour market will adapt and correct itself, the issue is what happens in the meanwhile with real people, with real lives. The numbers eventually balance out, real lives suffer.
No, you'd see jobs like Business Coach, Growth Strategist, and variations on such becoming more prominent and numerous - jobs the purpose of which is to take what the software does and explain it to people, as many times and in as many ways as it takes.
You'd need to automate Early Childhood teaching through to post-grad university student supervision to eliminate those jobs. Humans trust (make decisions based on) stories.
And in fact the most important part of what an accountant does is to convey stories. Software does all the rule-based stuff.
Automation eliminates jobs. Sometimes lower costs in one area allow more activity in another, but that does not change the fact that the automation eliminates jobs and should not be expected.
I have very interesting process when taking vacation. Automation does not mean robots from movie “I Robot”, some software can do the job too.
To take time off I must open shitty software, enter my vacation days, then print the sheet and sign it. My manager signs it too. Then I bring it to secretary, she signs too, confirms the date in shitty software. Secretary sends paper form to the HR lady, she checks, if it’s ok and forwards my sheet to accounting lady. I see here a huge potential for automation, throwing at least 1st secretary and HR lady out of the process. This ancient process is happening in Germany, but automation will come sooner or later even here.
That's also why it's usually a multi-year project to introduce SAP systems at an existing company. The hard part is not installing the software (though I'm not saying it's always easy either). The hard part is getting all layers of the company to change away from their pre-existing, sometimes nonsensical processes.
(Disclosure: I work at SAP, though not on customer-facing software.)
All things automation. Really a chainsaw is automation, and so is a compressor. Automation is a pen. They all remove work and increase efficiency.
There are lots of examples which don't really count though, such as self-checkout, which have exactly the same amount of work left, only who works it is a different person.
A chainsaw, compressor or pen are examples of mechanisation, not automation. They replace part of the human effort needed for a job, making the remaining human effort even more valuable.
Automation fully replaces human work for a given job. It's a difference in kind.
However, automation may replace only some jobs in a value chain, making the remaining ones even more productive and valuable.
A fully automated value chain is a difference in kind again.
The word "auto"(oneself), often used with meaning to do by itself.
Automation is a very broad term, which mechanization is a part, but not a requirement of.
Anything that moves work from human to other forces is automation, having a thing do things by itself. An automobile is the automating of our movement.
There is an interesting distinction used by some economists between "labor-saving"/"captial-augmenting" technology and "labor-augmenting" technology: the former encourages you to decrease headcount, while the latter nets you more units of work completed per unit of labor.
The horrors of the automation revolution have been on our collective mind for a long time. In the '70s this was one of my dad's favorite jokes:
"It's terrible, my father lost the job he had for decades. He was replaced by a clever mechanical gizmo just six inches long. And then my mom got one."
It plays on the fear of being emasculated by technology. Maybe that leads us to exaggerate the threat.
The fear is very real, not about emasculation, but a loss of identity in a society where "you are your job". I have seen this first hand in both people who weren't "essential" during COVID shutdowns (to their horror), and people who were deemed "essential" but it was, in their words, "bullshit".
Automation is rapidly accelerating into the wall that is identity beliefs at scale, and there is evidence that these belief systems are fairly rigid, making adaption to change challenging to say the least.
The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go (caveat systems are in place to ensure quality of life is provided for at an agreed upon floor). It's just a job.
"You are not your job" is one thing I keep teaching all my junior colleagues. Your work is not your identity, and should not be seriously attached to your ego.
This helps very much at code review and performance review times.
I spend more time doing my job than almost anything else. Sleeping is the only thing I spend more time doing. It might be healthier if I can avoid attaching so much importance and part of my identity to it, but I don't know how that's possible for me. Not only does it dominate my time, but it determines how much money I have for what I need and want and therefor what class of society I fit into and how difficult my life is/can be as a result. Really I see it more of an act of Zen doublethink to believe that your work should not comprise any part of your identity given how central it is to your experience as a human.
I find this really interesting because it's the exact opposite of how I think. I simply can't wrap my head around the concept, even knowing that many people think the same way.
Twenty years ago I had a friend who was a social worker and I offhand mentioned to her that "well, I'm not my job." She stared at me as if I had two heads and then said, slowly, "I completely agree with you, but you have no idea how rare it is to hear a man say that."
I enjoy my job and I'm happy to do it, but it in no way defines who I am for more than the 8-or-so hours per day I spend at it. The thing is, making your work your identity is almost central to the American male experience, and I doubt that's going away any time soon.
Doublethink being the act of simultaneously knowing something to be false while believing it to be true, and "Zen" here being a state of inner piece. So "Zen doublethink" would be choosing to believe something that you know isn't true for the sake of inner peace.
While correlating your identity with your job is probably not a good thing in a general sense of the word, I think looking a bit broader, having purpose in life is important; for a lot of people, that is their job / career.
In addition to automation, I fear there are a lot of bullshit jobs out there right now that people cannot see as their purpose; it's a job, they take it because they need to make money, and because there isn't a living to be made in what they themselves are passionate about.
There's a LOT of people who would love to make a living in the arts - writing, drawing, etc - but there's just not enough money in it because people aren't willing to actually pay for it, so they have to move their passion to a hobby while working a dead-end job where they are just a number in a payroll system - i.e. they are replaceable. McJobs, if you want.
> The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go
This is perhaps the only thing socialism got right. At least the flavor we had in Yugoslavia and the remnants it left on the psyche of my parent's generation.
You do your job, then you go home and live your actual life. The job exists as a way to "pay your dues" in society, but it isn't your life. Your life is home, family, the house you're building, maybe a little side business. That sort of thing.
My generation growing up in the 90's and 00's tossed that away and went full american. Hustle hustle. Doing your job is not enough. You must love your job or you are a failure.
We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life.
> We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life.
When I was younger and naive, I judged the Amish. As I've grown older and wiser, I realize they had the right idea all along. Family, loved ones, community first. Everything else serves those.
The Amish are actually some of the most successful businessmen.
So... its probably not all just "friends and family values" in the Amish world. Despite a luddite-based culture and "technically" an 8th grade education, they're probably one of the hardest working people around.
They just figured out where to focus their business chops. Organic foods, hand-crafted customized furniture, etc. etc. And the Amish have a huge reputation as among the best craftsmen and freshest foods for these sorts of things.
Their sense of community probably also helps keep the various Amish businesses alive since they help each other so much.
The Amish have built a prosperous life for themselves selling their brand of "quaintness" to Goldman Sachs traders buying curio cabinets and porch swings for their place in Sag Harbor.
My impression is that their brand is more about quality. I can't imagine the Amish "cost-optimizing" like big manufacturers do. So much stuff is a nice veneer with shoddy bones.
Regarding the Amish, I admire their approach to technology. Technology is only accepted if it benefits them without distracting them from their main duties (family & church).
This inherently makes them immune to the majority of the downsides we see in today's tech such as addictive patterns, advertising or "broken by design" tools as they would just not become accepted in the community to begin with.
Given the current, often user-hostile state of technology I think this is an example we should at least consider.
In modern America we used to have that, but non-job social structures have been hollowed out since the 1970s. Now Americans get a distressingly large percentage of their social interactions via work, making them psychologically dependent on their job too.
Well as I unerstand it, the average American salaried worker spends 10-12 hours a day, at least 5 days a week, at the office. With maybe 10 days holiday a year.
How does anyone have time to have an actual life outside work?
The error is universalism. Neither mindset you're describing is appropriate to be given a universal "should" status, people have differing preferences. Some rather enjoy having their work be a big part if not the primary part of their life. Plus there are many nice things which benefit everyone that wouldn't exist if the people who brought them about had just treated their jobs as jobs. Maybe some think those things shouldn't exist, but you'll never convince the creators of that.
Where America still shines is you can for the most part still go with either mindset as you prefer. Even in SV tech where there's so much "dream job" this and other such talk, BigCos are nevertheless packed full of employees for whom it's just a job. But there are the occasional rather devoted employees who put in much more than 40 hours (not to mention the fudgey to account for time where you're thinking about work topics in the shower, at dinner, before bed...) and that's fine, it can make a nice mix. Now if you start down the socialist path of promoting a universal policy, and there are many (like limiting work hours) that could support making things easier for the just-a-job mentality, what you're actually doing is eliminating an option people prefer, and a huge source of innovation along with it.
"Money doesn't buy happiness" is just something we tell the poor so they don't revolt -- this also applied to communism -- the communist elites lived a much better life materially and socially.
Sure, average Ivan was "happy" because his neighbors had just as crappy flat, just as crappy car, just as crappy job, just as crappy food and so on and there was no way for him to "better" his life because money was meaningless because thats not what Ivan really lacked -- he lacked freedom to do as he pleased with his money.
My point was that people are competitive, social animals and social status is very important; sure, communism castrated a lot of those impulses and some people claim they were much happier back then, but its mostly bullshit nostalgia.
I was very young back then, but I remember the deprivations, my kindergarten educator slapping me for not applauding "dear leader", my parents just leaving me alone in the flat because they had to go the communist parades, being lectured in kindergarden how my parents jobs(doctors) were in fact less important than the jobs of other coleagues worker-parents jobs who "perhaps" made the syringes my parents could not do without; I remember people having to work on saturdays, night shifts and so on.
Having not lived through it, but having seen a glimpse of its aftermath living in Berlin a few years, it was very interesting to see the contrasts between the Ossis and Wessis (at least ones that were say, at least 18 in 1989). In general, I found the Ossis to be more friendly and open and fun loving. For example, an Ossi party would usually be louder, messier, and have worse food, but everyone would be laughing and a guitar might come out at some point. The typical Wessi party I experienced was perfectly catered, everyone was perfectly dressed, and it was in a perfect house, but people weren't necessarily having that much fun.
Now this is different in other parts of Germany, but it's an interesting natural experiment, because these guys were literally in the same city.
It’s not exactly a novel concept. Compare your recollection of the low class Irish party scene on the Titanic. What’s your imagination of a suburban house party or block party compared to the eloquent glitzy ballroom party by the well-to-do? Not many in society are expecting the well off to have much fun in gatherings amongst themselves.
It should be obvious that money prevents the sorrow of poverty.
"Money doesn't buy happiness" refers to happiness, which is not simply the lack of sadness.
It means that once all the typical material needs are provided, simply having more money does not make people visibly HAPPY all the time, and most people tend to focus on other goals.
This has been proven again and again by scientific research.
The OP referred to Yugoslavia, its socialism was vastly different. After the first years of the Tito era, there was little pressure to praise Tito, just not to disparage him. The 1970s are fondly remembered as the decade of the vikendica and middle-class holidays in Bali. (Young Yugoslavs also made up a conspicuous portion of the travelers on the Istanbul–Kathmandu trail, because with the red Yugoslav passport one could travel visa-free all over the world.) If a person wanted especial material success, then one was free to go work in Western Europe, the borders were wide open and a huge amount of people took advantage of this opportunity.
If you are from Romania, as I assume from your username, the experience of socialism there, or other Eastern Bloc countries, does not even compare.
Money doesn't buy happiness. All it can do is buy distraction and remove physical discomfort like starving or sleeping in the rain or riding a bike instead of a car
My dad was salty during communism that he didn't get more "respect" for his labor (highschool teacher) than your run of the mill factory worker. I remember during the early 90s how he was hopefully saying that once the country exits the "transition" phase, we will all have the dignified life of middle class westerners.
Meanwhile the country still does the same in international rankings as it did during the time of our dear leader. However more of the egalitarianism we had disappeared, and while some enjoy some semblance of prosperity in the heart of the major cities, the bulk of the nation has no job security and no future prospect but to be a cheap labor source for the west.
> he didn't get more "respect" for his labor (highschool teacher)
> we will all have the dignified life of middle class westerners
What a sad irony. If he was a highschool teacher in the US as now he could be struggling to pay rent and medical bills and get more or less the same "respect".
At the time there were two issues:
- (I think) school teachers were better paid than now, relative to the average population
- People in communism mostly knew the US through Hollywood films, which portray a way more glitzy version reality. Especially so in the 80s in popular sitcoms like Dallas.
Super interesting. I believe we have a kind of reflex to also find part of 'us' in our role in society. And that it's not just an american culture bug.
Striking a balance between the two is subtle I suppose.
If we're talking about the Western world, and in particular, the politics and culture of class (of which "work being part of people's identity" is a part) then Judeo-Christian influence is the only influence that matters.
And memes like the dignity of labor, the just world fallacy (that wealth and poverty have inherent moral dimensions) and welfare (or leftist/secular ideology) breeding laziness definitely have their basis in Christian influence. I've seen people quote the Bible directly ("If a man will not work, he shall not eat") when criticizing UBI.
The just world fallacy in particular is going to hit people hard. People who believe society owes them safety, stability, a job and a living wage simply because they worked hard and obeyed the law are going to be hit with a rude awakening when they realize how capitalism actually works.
I'm agreeing with everything you wrote (with the minor differentiation that this is mostly rooted in particular protestant branches, not Christianity per se), but in my understanding the opposition to UBI is not primarily about dignity, but about identity, hence my comment. People were displayed as their being their job, not just generic underlings to the king, on egyptian stela from 3000 BC.
> but in my understanding the opposition to UBI is not primarily about dignity,
Opposition to UBI (as well as healthcare for all, proper schooling for all, nutritional food for all, etc) is about not wanting to pay higher taxes and maintaining a competitive edge in being able to obtain resources over others in society (or the world).
Those with more wealth (or who think they are capable of gaining more wealth) want to prevent others from having it, predictably.
There are lots of reasons for not supporting those things. Some in-line with what you said. Others not. The issues are more complicated than you're making them out to be.
I used to think that, but over the years, in my cohort, the same group of people oppose any measures at wealth redistribution or anything that helps people who sell their labor.
Removing tax advantages of healthcare from employers? Oppose.
Removing exempt status or even raising the minimum salary under which an employer has to pay overtime? Oppose.
Lowering the cost of education? Oppose.
Parental or sick leave? Oppose.
Outlawing non competes? Oppose.
There's always some reason, which I believe to be a façade. The consistency and fervor with which they do not want labor to gain negotiating power is revealing. And, of course, always in support of tax cuts.
It's the all-too-common "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" [1] mentality. When asked about these things, people imagine themselves as millionaires and then say "Well, if I were rich I wouldn't think those things were fair, so therefore I currently don't think they are fair either!"
The examples you gave originally (UBI, healthcare for all, etc.) are totally different than the ones you listed here, which are much more tightly scoped.
Edit: I'm not supportive of the first group because the policies as stated are wishes, not actual policies. For example, any real healthcare for all solution has to have a plan for dealing with the millions of people who are employed by the current healthcare system (which admittedly sucks) and who will be replaced by a new one. Similarly for UBI. It requires completely overhauling massive federal and state bureaucracies that have a lot of power.
I agree with you that many people who are against those things are they way you're describing, but many are not as well.
Complete overhaul is necessary. For example, mental health facilities can only be addressed on a federal level, same as healthcare. Otherwise the governments that do address them will get swamped with benefit received from across the country without the ability to collect taxes from the whole country.
The big ideas seem like wishes, but I think it’s completely doable. But a sizeable portion of the population opposes even the baby steps I listed, and I can’t deduce any reason other than they like to imagine themselves in the owner class and want to keep down labor.
>There are, and has been, hundreds of different cultures. Some have similarities, some are profoundly different.
These cultures didn't emerge from a vacuum completely in isolation from one another. Their similarities and commonalities are what form the basis for these categories, broad though they may be.
It's about stability. You carved a nice spot where you found joy and financial ... well .. stability. And now your life might go to the toilet. There's no guarantee that your next job will be
1. Fulfilling in itself
2. Provide the same income
3. Provide the same secondary benefits (colleagues, hours, boss, etc)
And.. automation is not even a guarantee that what your were producing is gonna improve (lots of chances it may but it can go the other way too: cheap commoditization)
Yes, all the unemployment/stock market value/income statistics all leave out the most important metric - the feeling of security, or insecurity I should say. Volatility is high, people can see it and feel it, and it shapes their decisions.
Volatility also open roads to predatory management. Last year I felt how job blackmail felt. It's near invisible, no one has to say a word. Your boss can just bully you and if you happen to like and need that job, you have to decide to harm your own daily life or suffer his ways.
>3. Provide the same secondary benefits (colleagues, hours, boss, etc)
Given how the job market is trending in favour of uber/postmates-style gig work (for people who aren't working in specific skilled trades) , I'd say it is guaranteed to be worse in all three aspects.
Ted Chiang made a similar point a few years back. (well not that phallic, but also about psychological projection as a reason for the AI fear)
"This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Doomsayers have been issuing similar warnings for some time, but never before have they commanded so much visibility.[...]AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields"[...]
"This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies."[...]
"The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism."
It is rather automation and not AI itself that will bring changes to the job market. And the article argues automation hasn't had the expected effect yet.
I usually stay away from this kind of topics, but this rubs me the wrong way and I have five minutes to burn. Probably because I expected better from him.
The mistake here is the nature of capitalism. In reality, when you see a bunch of companies beginning to turn everything into "a field of strawberries", something is going extremely right. Why? Because capitalism is working based on needs, and it means it found a way to satisfy a very deep (or very wide) need. At the end of the long chain there are people that are more satisfied with their lives than before.
As for being afraid of this? Hogwash. In nature every exponential curve is the beginning of a logistics curve. And the more complex the system, earlier the curve flattens. If you burn a forest it'l taper only when it has nothing left to burn. If you try something similar in a human society, it will find blockers long before that.
And that's why we should be more afraid of AI - there is the chance (small, true) that to an AI our society is as uncomplicated as a dry forest, and the feedback mechanisms that hold us in place just don't apply to it.
I don't think that no-holds-barred capitalism is the likeliest outcome for a superintelligent AI, but it is the one we need to be the most vigilant of. The abstract mathematician AI could just be allowed to live out its peaceful life proving ever-more-obscure theorems.
Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Factory floors are largely devoid of human beings. The US factory employment figures are down by more than half in that time, and that with a population that's doubled (so per-capita, factory occupations down to 25% or less or what it was).
Companies move to India or China, then some move back but with none of the assembly jobs, because they don't move back until the investment in automation is paid back efficiently.
Its easy to confuse 'automation across the job fields' with 'automation replacing people'. The first is slow - automation proceeds in rote assembly tasks and continuous-flow processes. But automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum. I still get my fries from a human being. I still get my hair cut by Anton at a local shop. My car is fixed by Mr. Harapat (though it got assembled by a giant robot).
My nieces and nephews are automation Engineers. They are as busy as they can possibly be, changing plants over to automation. It's cost effective when a plant grows past a certain size/capacity. And with the rising tide of population, plants that served us 20 years ago are woefully boutique now, being rebuilt, and being rebuilt automated.
> automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum.
Exactly. Its impact has been limited to areas where there is repetitive work on standardised, clean objects[1], in standardised environments, in product lines where volumes are sufficient to justify the investment in machinery.
> Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years.
Yes it has. The size of the needed investment has gone down a lot in activities where automation is feasible.
But manufacturing has been a minor part of the US economy for more than 30 years, and its share is getting smaller. "Services" is over 80 percent. Advertising, making movies, sports, construction... zillions of different things.
[1] If any manufacturing work should be automated, it's meat packing. Unpleasant, boring work that gives you carpal tunnel syndrome and other joint and tendon injuries. Plants are always short of workers and absenteeism is rife because of the nature of the job.
But automation is impossible, because animals are not standardised enough. Putting that another way: because machine vision is still so ludicrously bad. And so is the state of robotics.
Right took longer than 20 years. How the time flies! Used to be 1990, I swear. More like 50 or 60 years ago.
But in contrast, US manufacturing jobs have disappears much faster than that - by 1/3 in the 2000's alone. So the conclusion (few jobs remain, per-capita) is still a good one.
Automation happens not where many expect it (including the media). It is frequently expected that automation will come as replacement for humans, while it actually is coming in the form of better tooling and assistance to humans. This theoretically should be reflected in work productivity, not in employment numbers.
This is true, but better tooled, equipped humans do more work and so you need fewer of them.
When your landscaping company buys an excavator, one person can now move as much earth as 15 people used to. You don't keep the other 14 on the payroll.
What I've seen is that the competitor buys the excavator and the 15 people have to do the work for similar pay. The salaries go down, amount of work per worker goes up and the competitor makes exotic profits.
I've seen one fascinating example where pay per unit eventually boiled down to 40 cents per hour. That was the point where the automatons simply could no longer keep up. Some would decline to do the manual work. Those who did got the less frequent better paid contracts that paid up to 20 euro per hour. (for which no machine exists)
A larger amount of people can now afford landscaping services because earth moving cost have now gone down. Poor people used to go barefoot before industrialization.
Producing more with less human input is how we raise the living standards of everyone in the long term.
The Jevons paradox absolutely does play a part, especially at first, but I don't believe it's enough for higher efficiency to result in an overall win (edit: for the employees). Most markets saturate surprisingly quickly when you apply 10x - 100x efficiency increases.
Not pure 'automation' but rather 1 person overseeing several lightly automated processes.
So while 25 years ago you had 4 Operators doing 4 tasks together, you now have 1 Operator doing the 4 tasks with automated assistance.
Also often this person will make less than his individual 4 predecessors due to 'Tiered' wage systems. While being more physically(previous operators taking turns doing physical tasks, etc) and now mentally exhausted(ensuring process is correct) than them as well.
When 9 people can do the work of 10, the 10th person often finds themselves out of a job. It’s little different if your job type completely disappears or if the economy only needs half as many people doing your job, either way many people need a new type of job.
That's what the media has been screaming all these years. The reality is often that the 10th person has their role change, they retire off or (as in the case of the engraving industry), people end up buying more at a cheaper price.
Someone having their role change sounds fine, but it often means a skill and thus a longer term salary reset. Individually people may be better or worse off, but generally if you have 20+ years of experience doing something starting over is a major setback.
Granted for very slow transitions it’s not as big of a deal.
The one situation where I remember this happening specifically (when the BBC made footage archiving digital), they planned the automation rollout to coincide with retiring off the old analog librarians.
Then they hired them back out of retirement because the project went badly wrong.
The latter part went awry (although I think they didn't mind too much) but the timing kind of worked out.
In a more vicious corporation they probably wouldn't have been so bothered about the timing of the rollout.
Right. How many people would Google actually require to keep employed to keep their current business running, with capacity to serve the entire ad market of humanity? That's the level of automation we are dealing with, not some machine that prints more phonebooks per man-hour.
It should be noted that as efficiency increases, the company can compete and lower prices, meaning people don't _have to_ go to work as much to achieve the same level of living.
Yep. Except that instilling and maintaining institutional knowledge in an employee represents a sunk cost, which means the fewer employees you need for a job, the less it costs, even if the actual number of hours spent doing the job is the same. This is why instead of everybody working 3-day work weeks, we have 40% of people underemployed or unemployed and 60% of people being worked to death.
Right - and we have enough capacity / productivity now to feed, clothe and shelter the global population. The challenge is really how to distribute resources in a "fair" way whilst incentivizing growth in productivity to keep increasing quality of life for all.
The challenge is to get people to even consider it. In reality it is not hard to pay people to follow courses, pay people to tutor/helpdesk or pay people to be available when they are needed.
Imagine a gig economy where 100 employees are on call the year round, ready to jump in when you need them for as long as you need them, complete with training to make this absurd level of scaling possible. We could do a kind of fire drill to test your corporate scale-ability. Then we get valuable information: Your corp atm make 100 widgets per day but you can scale to 50 000 in 2 weeks.
One would just get a normal salary that goes up and down depending on training, market conditions, health and fitness. (the later 2 to some minimal extend)
In stead of a skill and experience starved pool to hire from it is redefined as a national asset. We monitor its market value and print money against it.
Since we/you/one/I want to feed, house and cloth everyone anyway we may coin a separate (freely exchangeable) currency for necessities and expire it after n months.
Just discarding people the way we do now quickly turns them from profitable & productive sources of tax revenue into expensive nuances. Having your head on the chopping block the year round with the sword hovering over it inspires a kind of productivity we no longer need. In the current economic situation we need people to maintain and grow their natural ability to think and learn. Similarly, people running businesses shouldn't have to fill their head with that horror nonsense either. They have better things to do for us. (things that they are actually good at)
As a robotics engineer I too once bought in to the notion that automation would lead to a massive jobs crash. But the more experience I get the more I see how big the problem space is. There's a million simple tasks we cannot do with robotics, and even when we can do them the machine costs $100k. Instead I am beginning to understand that humans and machines will work together for a long time.
I still think we can use automation to do radical things. I want to see us automate food production and meal preparation, to lower the cost of healthy food. By intentionally lowering the cost of human survival with automation, and with changes to intellectual property restrictions which keep costs high, we could create a world where food is so cheap we give it away to those in need. With changes to our cultural norms and broad application of this theory, it is literally possible to eliminate material poverty.
Think about it - in a world where there are only private book collections, some people are book-rich and some people are book-poor. But that kind of poverty is effectively eliminated if you introduce the concept of libraries to that world. If we share the automation we create the same way we share books at a library, we can create societies where everyone is provided for at no direct material expense to others.
Years ago I wrote an essay [1] where I used the concept of impending job loss from automation to emphasize the importance of this better way of living I proposed above. But I've realized that we don't need to see automation as an impending crisis - millions of people are already in crisis because they cannot afford the food, medicine, or housing they need. So the need for change is still there, but the cause is not some future problem, but the problems of the status quo.
There used to be local record shops and big ones downtown - music distribution has since become pretty automated. There used to be many bookstores around - book distribution has become fairly automated. Gamestop has been closing stores and has been hit by automated distribution in recent years.
I used to buy Hagstrom map books filled with detailed current maps - they were sold in gas stations and bookstores and they even had some of their own stores. Their stores all shut down and their business shrank enormously as map navigation became automated.
There used to be a lot of tour and travel agencies around. They still exist, but are much less prevalent and are scaled down.
In fact, automation of commodity distribution has had a major effect on retail, and consequently commercial real estate.
Insofar as office work - people who work in law tell me the large number of secretaries who shuffled through cabinets full of folders containing records have largely disappeared as record retrieval has been automated. I had data entry jobs many years ago, itself a type of automation - but the jobs I did have disappeared as data distribution has become automated.
I don't know what they are measuring but I have seen the effects of a automation all around. Maybe with the closing of bookstores and record stores and video game stores, they mean the role of a retail clerk has not been much automated, which may be true. But I have seen automation have a large effect on many industries, and then rippling effects onto industries like real estate.
The frequent problem with these types of reports is that they only focus on one part of the geography (USA).
That said, I recall reading a report that mostly middle class administrative and coordination roles are eliminated due to digitalization and dedicated software. Leading to negative wage pressure on the middle class.
These are repetitive human jobs like looking at a bunch of papers and creating a report.
Very much so; the current wave of automation is taking semi-skilled middle-class jobs and replacing them with low-skilled minimum wage jobs that can be filled with gig workers.
High-skill jobs are still there, but the middle is rapidly being hollowed out. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the middle class is shrinking as a result.
That’s an interesting take on Uber that I don’t think I’ve seen before.
I know Uber’s end-goal is automation such that taxi drivers aren’t necessary. What I didn’t realize is that it is route planning automation that allowed them to move from dedicated drivers to gig drivers.
Yeah, I recall an article about London taxi drivers having to memorize the labyrinth of streets in and around central London to get a taxi license. They were paid very well and the jobs were stable as a result — until Uber / Waze came along. Then the market was flooded by recent immigrants working for much less who were able to navigate unfamiliar streets with GPS and the job became way less stable.
I don't know enough about industrial automation to form an opinion, but RPA is definitely coming for the rank-and-file office drones.
You'd be surprised how many "paper pushers" still fill the cubicles of this world (their job literally to copy stuff from this ERP to this CRM or to this legacy Access / Excel / BI system). This is the low hanging fruit of job automation and enterprises are quickly figuring out what kind of cost savings RPA can offer them.
I have a feeling RPA will have a much higher adoption rate than the "digital transformation" trickle.
RPA is just systems integration for companies that have a broken software development process. That companies are having to resort to writing "robots" to fake pushing buttons in UIs should make you less confident in the advancement of automation not more.
It’s basically modified Parkinson’s law at play - work will expand to most available workforce.
With increased automation, either new jobs are created(thereby increasing the overall output of the economy) OR expectation for individual productivity is reduced, decreasing individual stress.
History is your proof. Automation has been constantly increasing forever and there’s no job loss en masse because of that. Empirically speaking there are almost always more jobs created.
While the adage is true, you also have to consider the quality of work. There are a LOT of people in the US right now with a college degree who can't find any jobs related to their majors, so they end up as baristas or Amazon order pickers - their education, talents, passions being wasted, their future pretty much on hold because jobs like that don't pay enough money to pay off student debt or buy a house.
In 1920 or 1950 if we'd had as many people with college degrees as we do today, we'd also have a LOT of people who can't find any jobs related to their majors.
What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in (unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a college degree. IMHO we have much more "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950, it's just that the number of college graduates has grown faster than the number of good jobs. In 1920 or 1950 there weren't enough good jobs for everybody, and the good jobs mostly went to people with college degrees. But the problem was not actually in the lack of college degrees - if most people have college degrees, then all that means that college degree ceases to be the pathway to good jobs, and other filtering mechanisms inevitably need to appear (and have appeared) to select which people will get good jobs and which will be left behind despite having a college degree.
Potentially somewhat controversial take on this: why do college grads deserve a better job than, say, high school grads if the subject they studied in college is not particularly relevant to the society at this point(which the lack of jobs for that qualification is indicative of)?
There was probably a point in time when learning hunting was like going to college and along comes farming to make all those hunters jobless. That’s how the wheel of “progress” rolls.
The idea that going to college will make you more bucks or guarantees you a job in your field of study is very arcane at this point.
The traditional answer to this comes from the age when college graduates were a distinct minority. In the 1950s environment, if a job applicant has a college degree even with irrelevant subject, then this means that the applicant has passed two filters (getting into college, and actually graduating with decent grades) for qualities that are relevant to most jobs but are hard to measure directly, so that degree is a very useful signal for evaluating people in a way that you can't do during an interview or two.
These qualities are not guaranteed but are correlated with being able to get into college and graduate - everything from conscientiousness, ability to follow arbitrary complex rules, general intelligence and also socioeconomic status (in e.g. sales and management, the social contacts of a high-SES employee and their family are very valuable in achieving business goals, and the social contacts of a low-SES employee are not). A graduate might not have these qualities, and a non-graduate might have them, but it's hard to tell so the degree is a useful proxy because it does (or did?) correlate with these qualities.
So it made all sense for businesses to prefer college graduates for certain types of jobs ("the good jobs") even if the college major was something like history or literature in a field of business where that's not relevant, and they did just that. And because of that employer preference, a college degree was a ticket to one of these good jobs.
However, if almost everyone gets a degree that means that there's no real filtering happening, and that benefit gradually becomes useless.
The headline (and paper) are titled "No Recent Automation Revolution." We might very well be on the cusp of one, but prediction was not the goal of this paper.
In the meantime, the disruptor for driving jobs has been the race to the bottom; services like Uber, Lyft, etc popping up, decimating the taxi industry by having their not-employees compete with each other for work, driving the prices down while they laugh all the way to the bank - they get their cut anyway.
While those jobs haven't been automated away as such, they are being priced away.
I’ve been having trouble reconcilling compelling evidence for and against automation based job loss / wage suppression, and usually the arguments against them look at super high level macroeconomic numbers (see: Pail Krugman’s analysis on productivity dropping for some recent years) while most people in support of the automation argument will go directly on the ground to places where auto manufacturers have had strong presence and also cite cohort analysis where laid off manufacturing workers take up gig jobs.
The primary impetus for automation are labor cost related but not necessarily to take over humans intrinsically. The top reason I heard uttered in my amateur research was a common theme of the past 100+ years - unions make things more costly whether in terms of capital or general speed / agility of the business. Wages are suppressed through automation effects noticeably around factories that automate compared to nearby cities that don’t. The suppression is concurrently correlated to labor suppression / arbitrage though so it is hard to detangle the automation v. labor angle because the biggest job losses and wage suppression happened before modern automation - they happened during the late 80s to 90s as unionization started dropping faster. Diminishing returns on outright hard balling unions would lead to more investment in machinery to drive down hiring needs and avoid the need to hire while also putting the companies that do automate in a better operational cost position.
We build quite the "contraception" for circuit board mounting anything not compatible with reflow soldering. It mostly works but the women that do it usually are just way faster and less error prone.
We have quite the high wage standard and even then the device is mostly used to show off.
Real automation is probably needed in bureaucratic workflows even if we usually think about manufacturing. There are probably advantages and disadvantages here as well.
Since order situation is great at my current company (strangely the covid-quarter was particularly good), we have significantly expanded workforce in production.
I doubt that unions really drove automation in my country though. Price plays a role but also technological feasibility.
How does this square with the type of automation Amazon is doing? The type that people rarely think is automation.
Retail jobs are being decimated across the USA not because robots are directly replacing them, but because as more people shop online these companies collapse and Amazon is able to perform the same service without the staff.
Maybe warehouse worker, delivery jobs and coders are increasing at the same place? That doesn't pass the sniff test to me as they seem to have much higher efficiency than your average salesperson at a retail store.
With all due respect, I thought Robin Hanson was better than this.
I followed him briefly during the 2013-2015 automation hype (which hasm't died yet; far from it), and I found him to be carrying out reasonable analysis of tech economics. I found him to be one of the few economists who are in touch with tech reality, and so things weren't that bad in the econosphere in terms of keeping up with tech trends.
This blog post doesn't help maintain that perspective at all. I'm sorry.
As a tech person myself, I'm extremely busy with making this happen instead of being a negative nancy towards other tech folks, but I'll finish my though with this:
I have a close friend who is a typical naysayer of tech progress, "business as usual", "old jobs replaced with new jobs", "capital is what makes thing work", "economics good technology meh"
He will not stop for a minute, and will not entertain a single of my counter-arguments.
What is super-surprising to me though is that in the last 5-7 years, he has pivoted from a non-tech job to complete-alignment with one of the big-tech companies, has been investing heavily in all kinds of big tech stocks, and watching his stocks with a keen eye day-in and day-out.
And everytime we talk, the first thing he discusses is my opinion and forecast of where technology is headed. Once having absorbed all that information, he goes back to his same old rotten cassette tape.
There are probably only a couple thousand people in the would that could write the appropriate code or make robots perfect enough to do many of the automated manufacturing tasks. And most of them are employed by places that mostly waste their talents
The simpler the task seems, the harder it must be. It's exactly why the task exists at all, it could not have been improved on before either and stopped there
> Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated?
Yes. "Simple economic theory predicts that, all else equal, employers are more eager to automate jobs with higher pay and more workers. So these two factors should predict job automation. And we do in fact see such effects in Table 3, though more consistently for pay than employment."
For automation to make sense from a business point of view the cost of developing & running the automation should be less than the cost of doing the work manually over an equivalent timeframe.
This is why for example there are a lot of bullshit office jobs that can be automated fairly easily but will not be because there's plenty of cheap labour to do it manually (for cheaper than what developing & maintaining the automation would cost) and it also earns them PR points about "creating" jobs.
No one will automate for automations sake - businesses choose how to deploy capital to improve efficiency, which can be achieved through scale or going after the largest cost
In the mid-twentieth century (IIRC) there was a "paradox" observed that the US was capital-rich but its exports were labour-intensive. Is this situation still true?
"Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated?"
Yes. One aspect that I've seen in e.g. computer vision and robotics for industrial automation is that there are a lot of processes for which we have the technology to automate production, but it's not worth because it's currently cheaper to get the job done manually by someone in a poor country getting paid very, very little.
However, the obvious implication is that if/when the worker conditions in the world improve and these workers start requiring reasonable wages then these jobs will be automated pretty much immediately. If the shop owner has to choose between buying a robot or providing a handful of rice to a team of near-slaves, the people are cheaper; If the shop owner has to pay something comparable to the minimum wages in the first world, then the best worker gets to supervise and clean the imported robots and all the others are out on the street.
If the first world would stop offshoring these jobs to poor countries, then that would not mean large numbers of blue collar jobs coming back, that would mean shifting to automation.
> Last December, Keller Scholl and I posted a working paper suggesting that this whole narrative is bullshit, at least so far.
Thing is, when you are calculating the color of the sky, then it is either a bluish looking spectra, or you are in trouble. And consequently physicists will look outside immediately after that calculation.
The entire post needs an explanation of why they don't find any automation in that timeframe? I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on. If they don't see that in their data, then my immediate assumption is, that they need a more reasonable approach.
> I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on.
Automation replaces human work, business can do better now, then they want to produce more than before so they up hiring as well. It's much easier to set your target higher (production, profit) than to automate anything. As soon as you have automated something new work pops up, work that was probably not done before for lack of resources.
Programming has been automating tasks for decades yet here we are, so many of us. Cloud should have automated many jobs, yet with this new found ease of deployment we chose to deploy more rather than hire less. As long as humans have needs and desire for betterment I don't think we can surpass our ever growing ambition with automation.
The article reads like sour grapes about an article that didn't get as much attention as the author believed it should, and yeah, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Certain tasks that form a particular job are being automated more now than ever before.
This is more true of knowledge workers where they are operating and working in a digital environment already (e.g. traders, accountants, lawyers, marketing, admin...)
This is less true of manual labour - like cleaners and gardeners - why? Well look at robotics, its good but nowhere good enough to replace these dexterity required which a human can provide.
For knowledge workers it is very hard to automate all the tasks that make up a job. Hence why automation has not resulted in mass unemployment (excluding all other factors).
> Two metrics created by groups trying to predict which jobs will get automated soon did predict past automaton, but not after we included 25 mundane job features like Pace Determined By Speed Of Equipment and Importance of Repeating Same Tasks
This sounds like a thoroughly fallacious argument? Automation is progressing not by automating jobs in the exact form that they were previously done, but by more automatable (and therefore more automated) forms of job displacing less automatable forms of those jobs. Isn't that exactly what we'd expect?
The ongoing "web 2.0" revolution is finally reaping the benefits of computers and networks, more than 50 years after they were invented. Paper processes are finally on the verge of being eliminated. Remote work is finally possible for many people.
Deep learning will have a transformative impact too, but these things take time. Let's talk again 10 years from now.
Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that.
Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass bureaucracy - it's now streamlined.
We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money.
Secretaries don't type memos.
Many newspapers are dropping photographers in lieu of training journalists on how to use their iPhones.
We don't manage a lot of paper records anymore.
So a lot of things have accelerated, it might not show up in the job market, it may not even show up in the GDP if consumers are in fact getting all the surplus. Life can get a lot better in many ways without a hint of GDP growth. GDP growth usually only happens (all things being equal) if there is either more cost (edit: 'maybe' bad for consumers but not necessarily), more profit taking (also bad for consumers), or more government spending (neutral
for the citizenry - depends on the efficiency of spending).
Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that.
Sit through the credits at the end of an effects-heavy movie and look at the thousand or so people involved. The physical effects operations were never that big. I visited Kerner Optical, the physical effects end of Lucasfilm, once, and they had maybe 100 people. (They're gone now, spun off and didn't make it as a standalone company.) Overall, the number of people involved in a major movie seems to be up, not down. Much to the annoyance of some people in the industry, who, 20 years ago, thought they'd be able to make major films with 30 people.
Movie credits list everybody who did anything to production, even for a few hours. Movie industry is a gig economy, being listed is your proof of actual experience.
So all these effects people may have spent a week producing digital effects which took many months for a small "analog" team.
I understand your point, but that doesn't seem to be what the article talks about. From the linked article:
> Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning.
Emphasis mine.
Their point doesn't seem to be that automation isn't happening, but that there is no revolution incoming that is driven by new tech. You can see that in their bulleted point summary:
> * Which job features predict job automation how did not change from 1999 to 2019.
If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed.
I think a lot of people that are in the AI/Tech space are probably a bit detached from the realities of non-tech businesses. While you talk of "new tech" being AI and deep-learning, I'm still in the process of implementing barcoding systems in warehouses. I think the vast majority of businesses just aren't ready to move into the data-driven AI space that you call new tech. They're 20 years behind it.
"If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed."
This is definitely not self-evident, moreover, I'd totally disagree with it.
The authors are essentially missing the point by trying to categorize jobs or features of jobs as 'automatable' when in the grand scheme, it's just not how it works.
Everyone's jobs are evolving due to automation.
1) Automation has been steadily happening due to progress in IT for decades.
2) AI, in particular, is a nascent field, moreover, it's really on a 'tool' in the tool chest of IT systems overall. The time horizon for impact for direct impact of 'AI' will be a long way off, and when it is, it won't be directly apparent in most cases. There will be very few jobs where we'll be able to say 'AI replaced me'. Maybe Taxi drivers.
3) And my point - is that automation is tremendously difficult to measure in reality, and that it changes the nature of some jobs more than others, and in ways that cannot be measured by using employment numbers.
The 'AI replaced the taxi drivers' example, derived from our 'Industrial Revolution' thinking about automation and productivity, is an outlier.
Seeking to find ways in which 'AI replaced cab drivers' is probably worthwhile on some level, but it's going to miss 95% of the revolution.
Think of an Amazon product picker - their jobs have changed tremendously due to automation. There may be all sorts of flavours of AI baked into an Amazon warehouse pickers job now and in the future: a lot of AI in the vision/3D control for the robots which incrementally replace humans. AI in the route optimisation, AI in labour scheduling (no longer done by humans), AI in facilities management (ordering parts, service automatically).
All of this may lead to considerably more efficient workplace and yet not a single job may be lost nor might it lead us to think of some magic tech replacing some workers in a specific way, rather 'the system got smarter'.
The economic equilibrium may in fact lead to considerably more people being hired to do 'different kinds of more automated picking', not fewer.
The AI revolution is the same as the information revolution and it's happening across the system in myriad ways that will be very hard to measure as we would like.
Their definition of "automation" isn't a binary toggle, but a grade scale based on expert research:
> For our purposes, a key ONET job feature is “degree of automation,” ranging from “not at all” to “completely.” [...] (Note, these scores are expert judgements, not model predictions. Such scores for all jobs are found here: https://www.onetonline.org/find/descriptor/result/4.C.3.b.2?...)
From the linked paper.
> The economic equilibrium may in fact lead to considerably more people being hired to do 'different kinds of more automated picking', not fewer.
I think you agree with them, then:
> Labor markets change more often due to changes in demand, relative to supply.
Slight anecdata. Lots of secretarial roles do take handwritten notes. It's an odd time because it's clear that human intervention is almost not required anymore.
Automation has been progressing for at least three hundred years now, from the era of the Jacquard loom and the cotton gin. I was born in a country where when I was little there still were telephone operators. Those thousands of jobs disappeared long ago, around the time when rotary phones disappeared. Nothing to do with AI.
Wages and employment remain constant because companies are still more like social constructs that provide minimal support in exchange for membership in a social hierarchy. They’ll always find something for you to do.
Learn to code” is popularizing the conversion of everybody into software engineers, but actually we don’t need most SWE either, so now we have an entirely new class of useless jobs on a SWE assembly line where 99% of the work product is simply discarded, but we still use the old industrial productivity model to drive productivity by aggressive management.
I actually disagree with this article. Based on my experience in the insurance industry, it is slowly but surely coming. It will appear not as a sudden drop, but as a gradual need for fewer and fewer roles as technology initially allows humans to do more with their time, and eventually replacing some of them. It is going to be a small effect on any one company. But a large effect over all, which will manifest over a long period.
So, an Amazon warehouse works like a grocery store from back then? What is the ratio #sold goods / #human worker for Amazon and for an old fashioned grocery store?
Living in a country where people are expensive and machines are cheap, I can attest the automation level is higher here. For instance, I often see cows at farms here enjoying automated brushing systems. There are youtube videos in english, but I don't recall ever having seen something like that in the US, even at Harris Ranch.
(I have yet to witness a farmer using fully-autonomous hay feeding robots, but the ag magazines have been running articles on them)
Wasn't the choice between offering the brushes or brushing them manually? Around here I see that farmers find installing a EUR 2'500 brush to be much cheaper than attempting to pay cheap foreign labour to brush cows.
Yes, I meant it's not a choice whether to brush at all. And if you have more than one or two cows the choice between the autobrush and manual seems clear, especially since the cows seem to love them and can use them whenever.
There will always be competition, innovation, and new markets. New needs will arise in consumers, driving new product and service needs. We may automate more low-level legal tasks, but more money will be spent on massages, or therapy, or art. It's unlikely there will be mass automation any time soon.
In fact automation often goes top-down, reeucing complexity of difficult jobs and allowing lower-skilled workers to deal with the rest that isn't yet profitable to change.
I don't think anyone believes that the automation revolution is happening right now, but that it's imminent and we should start preparing our societies to cope with it now.
> Our paper has so far received zero media attention
I thought about this article in context of the recently reposted piece "There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence" [1]. While it may be true that we haven't been able to automate new kinds of jobs, maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy. That would contradict this article's claim that the narrative around an incoming automation revolution is bullshit. Just as likely, though, is that we actually are decades out from AGI and that kind of automation.
> maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy
What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty years ago?
My point isn't that AGI is useless. But it's currently an article of faith. Faith is fine. Faith is essential. But isn't a good way to make huge allocations of resources.
His assertion that we could always be one discovery away is not false, it's just irrelevant. The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the recent past. Just inventing AGI wouldn't actually change much the next day, it would just be a new paradigm, and things would eventually change... so I agree with TFA.
(Also, AGI would be not so useful. Humans are notoriously difficult to work with, and we seem to have General Intelligence. It would have to have a strange concoction of motivations to be immediately --- or even eventually --- useful for anything that we would want to automate).
I definitely don't mean it as in "AGI is invented; humans need not apply", but in the point you've covered:
> The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the recent past.
My point was that predictions of AGI being so far away may be false, as explained the article I linked. If they were false, and we ended up with AGI, I don't think the article's assumption about the near future will apply. This does not need to happen overnight, it can take time, but the kinds of jobs we could automate would change drastically over time (and the time scale in the article is two decades long!)
On your second point, though. Part of why humans are difficult to work with because we have our own emotions and motivations and sometimes decide not to do things other people want. An extremely intelligent AI that did only what it was told to do would probably not be as difficult to work with?
The idea that intelligence is disconnected from the "baser" instincts like emotion, need to eat, need to reproduce, need for social recognition, etc is probably just false. Akin to there being a useful measure IQ which predicts ability to solve the worlds problems (hint: Nope). Our story-telling mind can construct all kinds of intelligent hypotheses, but was probably evolved to appear rational to our fellow people and attribute agency where possible. Our wander-through-the-woods mind can visualize and hypothesize about spatial relations and transformations, etc.
There's much to do for AGI, but I believe that motivation-engineering will be the hardest part. Morality is intrinsically connected to our role as sorta-hive-minded monkeys.
Caveat: All the above is poorly presented opinion from the following resources:
- Learning how to learn on coursera
- Buddhism and modern psychology on coursera
- Righteous Mind by Haidt.
- Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt
- Bullshit as an honest indicator of intelligence
Building a machine using our evolutionary history as a prior design is the only way we know how to produce general intelligence, but all the strange, varied, "Emotional" baggage that goes with it means we never would. Why would a computer be afraid of snakes? If what you want is a computer that can come up with solutions you wouldn't have imagined, then you need clever search, problem specification, and significant computation, not general intelligence. If you want to automate something, you may need learning, but don't need intelligence.
From my perspective, there are essentially two directions from which we can reach AGI.
One is that we may gain sufficient understanding how minds work and become able to implement one. IMHO it's a reasonable assumption that we currently have sufficient hardware capability to make the proper computing power for a mind with human-equivalent intelligence if only we knew how that mind software should be structured, but we simply don't really know how minds work, how they should work, and how to build them. There's lot of work being done there, some knowledge is being gained, but it seems that incremental advances won't be sufficient and progress will happen only in the case of a major breakthrough which we can't predict or expect any time soon - or, possibly, never; there certainly are people arguing that.
The second direction, on the other hand, does not presume a theoretical understanding of how intelligent minds truly work on a high level, but refers to brute force and/or simulation of low level constructs in human brains which we can understand and implement without needing a theoretical breakthrough. This approach requires immense computational power far beyond our current capability, so it's completely unrealistic to attempt in the near future - but twenty years of Moore's law has brought us twenty years closer to a brute-force solution to AGI. If we look at the estimates made in 2000 or earlier (I seem to recall reading brain-brute-force estimates from 1980s but I can't find them now. Perhaps Kurzweil was writing something like this already back then?) about the expected requirements for computing power and the expected progress, then we're pretty much on track; the computing power lines cross at something like 2050-2060; any hopes of "GAI in 2020" were based on the first approach which requires a breakthrough in understanding.
So from this perspective AGI is inevitable even without any progress whatsoever in "true intelligence" research, as long as our physics research and engineering keeps delivering improvements to raw compute power. We'll reach that point someday, likely within my lifetime, even without a breakthrough. But if we do start to understand how minds should be properly constructed, then that can easily shave many orders of magnitude off of the computing power requirements, and accelerate the arrival of GAI by decades.
> What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty years ago?
None; I agree. But we have no evidence we are 20 years away from it either. The article I linked gives reasoning for why we shouldn't assume the latter, and prepare for the former.
Resources are scarce; decisions have to be made about where to use them.
The likelier severe risks are nuclear war, pandemic, volcanism, earthquakes and tsunamis, multinational infrastructure cyberattack, bioweapons, nonlinear climate change (e.g. a step change in strength and duration of heatwaves making most of North India and Pakistan uninhabitable), and multiple food supply system collapse (e.g. widespread outbreaks of severe wheat, rice, potato and corn diseases).
In contrast to those risks, which we understand quite well, humanity has no idea how an AGI might be made. Since a putative AGI will be made by humans, this is a big stumbling block for anyone who proposes we need to divert resources to AGI risk.
There's no technical or physical limit to why so many things can't be automated, which means everything that can, will be automated eventually.. Super popular games like Factorio and Satisfactory are glimpses of a potential near future.
There is an economic limit. If the cost of the machine is more than the human then your competitors will use humans and you’ll loose a ton of money on every product you sell. Of course that doesn’t matter because there is no technical limit on the value of your stock so as long as you are the golden boy it doesn’t matter
The post implies that the authors' paper has received limited attention from the economic establishment due to its heterodox conclusion, but elides any supposition as to why its heterodoxy should be so controversial. Why should it be?
It's in a shit journal, so that's a start. I think part of it is that he's strawmaning here. The fear of automation isn't quite that it's immediate, it's more about the ability of machines to erode away economic opportunity of communities. People haven't been saying jobs are gone, just that eventually they will be soon(ish). Arguing that jobs aren't gone yet isn't helpful.
It's also incredibly difficult to read. I studied this and find it confusing - I can only imagine what a journalist would be able to take away from it.
1999-2019 has created massive technological capability for automation, which has been significantly underutilized mostly due to the rapid progress of globalization and offshoring of labor.
2020-2040 could have massive automation just with today's tech as soon as it's economically worthwhile - i.e. if you're not competing with workers who'll slave all day in dangerous conditions for peanuts. In 2000, we couldn't automate many jobs, in 2020 we choose not to automate them.
Sure, but I doubt they gave firm timelines. Future projections are always murky, but it seems pretty clear that the tech is in a much better spot and the incentives are now stronger than ever. Human workers get sick and can't work? Automate them away!
How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn?
I'm still limited by processing speed.
I imagine between math improvements, electrical engineering, computer science improvements/discoveries, and more we can automate jobs that require thinking or fine motor movements.
Most estimates a decade ago forecasted massive automation-caused job losses by 2020.
> How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn?
How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient?
> I imagine
I do to. But based on current technology, we have no idea how to achieve these goals. We can't even model how or when we might do so. This implies a deep lack of meta knowledge.
> How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient?
They didn't become sentient, but at the time how the Quality distinguished themselves from the rabble was through art, literacy, and music, all of which were achievable (to some degree) by mechanical loomwork substituting brass for brains.
It's also worth noting that if we get a major switch to self-driving cars, that won't create a new industry but rather diminish one - a big hypothetical benefit of a self-driving-car world is that much less cars would be needed; as most current cars are idle most of the time and even in peak driving hours, so a societal switch to "self driving cars on demand" services would mean that we would need much less cars than today.
Which is great for the planet, but not so great for jobs in car manufacturing industry, at least in the long run.
I have sort of a first hand account of what the current problem with (At least one area of automation) is.
Up until the quarantine I was working in a cowork space; and it happens that - I'm the sole employee of the company I work for in my country - all the desks around me were occupied by a company that makes a lot of their income providing automation to other parties.
I even worked for them for a few months as an "on demand" consultant; the idea would be that I would provide assistance to their devs when they needed help with the "programs" they were developing, and that fastly turned into a process review that eventually cooled off because they weren't - the project manager, at least - very keen on taking my advice.
What I observed was that - bear in mind this is a 3rd world country - the salaries were rather low, so obviously they couldn't get experienced people.
This lead to they having to train them, but as they had no experience, the way in which they approached solving the issues where, a lot of times, "complicated".
Usually they suffered from the apps being interfaced having changes along the project (Or after). This meant they had to fix a lot of problems that were not there in the beginning.
AS the devs had only experience with this tool, and was their first experience coding, they couldn't make the most of the other tools at hand. This mostly lends to processes that take hours to complete, being the execution time only marginally better than a person. This coupled with the issue right above this, many of the projects had a time excess of around 100% (Effectively taking double the time that was allotted in the beginning). Last I heard from them, thought, is that they made a lot of improvements here.
In one particular project I practically had to threat the person responsible to use javascript to fetch data from the browser instead of the "native" way of doung that (Basically, querying the page through the tool with xpath expression).
When they did change to javascript, the process execution time was reduced by >90%
All in all, the problem I see with automation is that the people doing that is not formally trained in coding, and the tools I looked at have rather weak integrations with the most used apps today (Namelly, browsers).
I think the idea for many of these tools is to allow people to automate themselves, but that will lead in my opinion into the "phpization" of the automation area.
All in all, there are a few caveats: I know from them of at least one company that had a rather strong and professional dept., and they where _very_ good at it.
I think that eventually automation is going to take the world by storm in the next 5- 10 years. And those that adopt early will have a clear advantage over those that not.
For the record, the tool they use is Blue Prism; according to the CEO of this company BP has some sort of marked edge over UIPath when it comes to enterprise settings. I know there are other tools in the market, but I don't know them except by name.
We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing. You’ll still need a few, but if we collect data on the few it’s possible to scale those answers to millions.
That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized.
Now, those people will be retrained to do something. Maybe even just do more detailed customer service. So I’m not too concerned - just saying automation is coming
Everything having an awful phone tree doesn't seem like we are a couple years away from automating customer service.
What's happened is companies have restricted the customer service they offer (the phone operator can't do anything the customer can't do on the website). That's not automation getting closer, it's the service getting shittier.
(seriously compare calling a hospital and talking immediately to an operator that connects you to the person you want to listening to 3 selection lists with the same virus warning at the beginning of the each one and then talking to an operator that connects you to the person you want...)
Agreed that phone trees are awful, but the exact same logic done in a chat form is surprisingly sane. We can easily skim past the bullshit with our eyes, and hone in on what we need quite quickly. In many cases I prefer it to the triage by humans, with their bad microphones and unfamiliar accents.
It doesn't even need to be sophisticated logic, with heavy use of AI and conversational styles of communication. A simple "what are you looking for?" with some preset options is pretty great.
I keep seeing praise for chatbots, but every single one I've interacted with has been exactly as useless as an IVR. Do you have an example of a useful chatbot?
Chatbots are only good when staffed with a competent backing crew, and only offered to the user when those agents are online. But most companies invest the minimum in the chatbot experience so it blows.
> That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized.
Yea, but does it...you know, work?
Why didn't the internet already eliminate most customer service? The common inquiries can easily be found solutions to online. if I'm calling support it's almost always because the resources available don't solve my problem. And spending 20 minutes on the phone with an automated system asking about billing is very frustrating.
It just has become a filter for people with serious enough problems.
If you can spend 10-15 minutes navigating voice menus, waiting, and listening to canned messages, likely you need operator's help badly enough. Anyone with a petty problem would have hung up already. And the canned messages also eliminate some of the calls which seek some obvious information.
You know, it used to be somehow hard, but not impossible, to reach an oracle in ancient times. Now the same is done on mass scale.
I agree with you, but probably not for the same reason.
I think Millennials are less comfortable talking with people and are willing to put up with less flexible and less powerful automated solutions where their parents would not. Expect customer service to get even worse with automation, not better.
I disagree with this being a millennial problem, but it's rather a Gen Z issue.
I'm approaching 26 and still vastly prefer talking to people to solve my issues. Perhaps this is because I work in software and am aware of the massive pile of crap most phone trees are so there is some bias here.
My go to solution to get a person on the phone is whenever a machine asks me "What can I help you with?", I purposefully mumble and make weird noises that it cannot understand. 2-3 repeats and it gives up and automatically passes me to an operator or CSR. I assume this is to better help the elderly or disabled but it sure is useful if you know it exists.
Also in the customer service segment, we continue to accelerate the move to wipe out fast food jobs. Four million people work in fast food restaurants in the US. I'll be surprised if around 1/4 to 1/3 of those jobs don't vanish this decade. That is part of the automation revolution and it is underway. Just the process of automating ordering at fast food restaurants as we already easily can, will remove several hundred thousand jobs permanently.
The sceptic in me wonders how much capital the fast food industry is willing to invest to replace cheap labor. I'm not really arguing with you just reflecting on my own experiences with current start of the art tech.
"Did you say at fries to that?"
No
"Added 27 orders of fries, anything else"
Arghhhh!
w/ touch screen you don't need to 'speak' unless maybe blind or something... So, you could be more accurate.. I mean I ALWAYS use mobile ordering now when going through drive through. I'll pull over, sit for a moment, place my order, then get in line.
Since COVID started I've been using some mobile ordering apps more and more. One of my new favorites is Whataburger here in Texas.
Texans know that Whataburger is infamous for being slow since everything is made to order. In-n-Out has figured it out but Whataburger is still so slow for some reason. With the app, I can place an order in my driveway, then arrive at the drive thru about the time its ready. If I'm lucky, I can skip the line and pull up and have it brought out in a few minutes. What used to be a 20 minute parking lot wait crawling through the line is now 5~ minutes.
Sometimes if it's busy or late at night and they don't have as many staff, I have to wait my turn in line, but I'm usually not sitting for 5 minutest at the window after paying waiting for the grill. Oh and that's another benefit. Apple Pay makes it seamless to place an order and not deal with CCs that are wearing out being declined.
My biggest complaint is still being required to download a separate app for each restaurant, but for now I can tuck them all away into a folder and forget they exist. If an app isn't in my home screen, I'm going to open it from a spotlight search.
For restaurants I don't visit as frequently, I'll call them and place an order for pickup. This also has the benefit of not incurring many of the BS fees that specialty online ordering platforms charge. It's going to take me a few minutes to order anyway, app or call, so I might as well save 10% by calling.
> Texans know that Whataburger is infamous for being slow since everything is made to order. In-n-Out has figured it out but Whataburger is still so slow for some reason.
The analysis is obviously incomplete. Making your order to order, in a timely fashion, was the point that distinguished Burger King from McDonald's.
Un-lucky for you, I am uniquely qualified to rebuttal this with evidence from my time working at Burger King. Very rarely was the burger cooked to order. Assembled, yes, but the cooking was done in a giant broiler machine with a conveyer belt and the patties were stored in heated containers for up to 2-3 hours until you ordered it.
They're not willing to invest much, but the required hardware is getting cheaper all the time, and the required software has enormous economies of scale - you can spread the development cost across many thousands of restaurants worldwide.
Which the link doesn't particularly seem to be analyzing. McDonalds eliminating ~1 near minimum wage job at every store isn't going to be reflected in wages of the remaining employees.
Wages are going up, so McDonalds is reducing the number of jobs. If you come inside to order, you have to fill your own drink; if you drive through, a robot does it. Stores have ordering kiosks and app based ordering so less staff needs to take orders. They've experimented with call center drive through processing before (it didn't work well at the time). It's harder to see, but they do lots of labor saving in the kitchen too.
The Founder was a nice movie about McDonald's founding. They have automation and labor-saving devices and processes cooked right into their early DNA. Recent efforts around automated ordering are just the last straw in a long line of efficiency optimizations.
