The myth was that Henry Ford decided to pay his workers $5 a day when he realized that if they couldn’t afford to buy the cars he was building, he wouldn’t be able to sell cars. It’s not true, but the allure of the myth was undeniable. Without a sufficient population of buyers, sellers can’t sell. The shine of technology has blinded its sycophants to this concept.
At Room for Debate, the New York Times (in its Trump-obsessed way) sought to disprove the claim that the suffering of the middle class had to do with jobs and companies fleeing the nation by noting that the greater threat to middle-class existence was automation.
Globalization and trade agreements have been blamed for costing millions of Americans well-paying jobs. But a far greater force in the gutting of middle-class life in the United States has been automation, which has replaced well-paid workers with robots and digital platforms. The greater efficiency fuels economic growth, produces cheaper products and makes life’s task easier. But in the process, many are left poorer and less secure.
Five people participated in the debate. Their solutions were:
- Invest in Technology With Social Benefits
- Increase Top Tax Rates to Cut Middle-Class Taxes
- A Universal Basic Income Would Insure Against Job Loss
- Incentives for Entrepreneurs and Subsidies for Low Wages
- Companies Need to Pay to Train Potential Workers
There are some themes running through each of these proposals, all of which come down to the belief that there is some sugar daddy out there who can magically dig into their pocket and fix the problem for everyone.
Technology is rendering physical labor unnecessary. We applaud the coming of self-driving cars because they’re cool (no, they’re slow and no fun) and will save lives (maybe, or they’ll kill you on purpose to save someone else’s life). But an industry that provides jobs for millions will disappear. Just as technology has sucked jobs out of the economy before. When robots work assembly lines, displacing high (maybe too high) paying jobs, we pretend some other vast pool of great jobs exists somewhere else, in the mist. They don’t.
The question isn’t whether technology can accomplish the goal of replacing human labor, or whether shifting needs will render old industries and jobs obsolete, which has certainly proven to be the case, but what we’re going to do with all the bodies left behind. They can sit home and watch the world on their computers, waiting for the welfare check to be paid by a government whose only source of taxes is the increasingly small percentage of the population working plus the tax the rich myth.
You know the one, where there are 100 people so fabulously wealthy that we can fund free everything for America off their backs. These 100 people will keep amassing yuge, undeserved fortunes, which the rest of us will suck out of them to feed our families. And they will continue to do so forever, like an energy source that never dies.
There is no solution in the debate that involves either personal responsibility or a sustainable future. Someone else will fix our problems. Someone else will give us money. Someone else will make it all better. We’ve long believed in American Exceptionalism, that we possess some voodoo that will magically save us from, well, anything. Years ago, following the 2007 recession, I suggested that the well may have already run dry and there will be no birth of an industry that will pull us out of the hole and shove piles of cash in our pockets.
We blame President Obama for not bringing back the jobs we enjoyed before the economy imploded. He hasn’t, but it’s not entirely his fault. They’re gone. Poof. He can no more make jobs that are no longer needed appear than the debaters can make the government flush with cash to pay us to sit home and watch Youtubes for the rest of our lives.
Great thinkers in the past have warned us where paths would ultimately lead. Vonnegut gave us Harrison Bergeron. Orwell gave us 1984. Heinlein gave us TANSTAAFL. The list goes on. And yet, we neither know nor accept their warnings, as if our denial and ignorance will magically result in some savior as yet unknown fixing everything. Maybe Malthus’ vision will prove right, and we will kill ourselves off to the point where we’re sustainable again. Maybe we’ll take up Swift’s modest proposal.
What we are doing at the moment is sinking ourselves deeper into a hole from which there is no apparent escape. Much as we adore AI and our shiny iToys, we’ll get bored sitting home, doing nothing, pretending that somewhere, somehow, someone will rise up to give us wealth and purpose so that we can continue to enjoy the lifestyle we’ve come to believe we are due.*
We will order our burgers at McDonalds at kiosks, because they can’t sell them to us for 99¢ while paying workers $15 an hour and still be sufficiently profitable to make it worthwhile to keep the company in business (yes, I know that you think companies magically rake in fabulous wealth from the invisible hand, but it actually comes out of our pockets). All those people who would have worked for McDonalds won’t enjoy the vast benefits of a livable wage, because they won’t have jobs. And eventually, they won’t be able to buy their burgers.
No, there is no easy answer, but the answers we want to believe are the ones that will doom us. Each of the debaters at the New York Times believes that a unicorn will leap from its rainbow to save us. Henry Ford sold cars because people worked, earned a living, and had the money to spend on Model Ts. Unicorns don’t need cars.
There were plenty of tweaks around the edges of this scenario, but the bottom line is that if there is no need for people to work in the future, then the only source of support left will be the government. Where do you think the government gets the money from to make your life fabulous? Okay, maybe not fabulous, but good enough to buy the next shiny iToy. Do the math.
*I’ve avoided using lawyers as an example, as you’re already sad enough. We keep hearing about the A2J gap, that people can’t afford lawyers and so we, noblesse oblige, should be giving our services for free (or low bono, a cutesy phrase created by people earning a paycheck from some law school sucking the next generation dry that promotes the idiotic concept that a client paying you the equivalent of what it costs for you to operate is almost as good as actually earning a living) for the good of others. Except lawyers are sucking wind for lack of paying clients.
So the poor are asked to give to the poor because economics-challenged thought leaders cry sad tears. And young lawyers practicing door law are told that this is a vast opportunity, to work 100 hours a week and earn what they could make at McDonalds, to serve the unfortunate because they aren’t unfortunate enough themselves.
And before you get all jealous of the sliver of the profession that’s being paid $180k despite being clueless, that too will fall when the corporations find out that there is no one left to buy the crap they sell. Eventually, their savings will run dry, just like your mommy’s and daddy’s, and they won’t have the money to put gas in their Ferraris, which will be worthless when no one has the money to buy a used supercar, which will be illegal anyway because it requires an unsafe driver to operate it.
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SHG,
There is always the inexhaustible, and extremely low cost of, Soylent Green! Next best thing to skilled manufacturing jobs too!
And, of course: the “yum” factor.
All the best.
RGK
As tasty as the young ones may be, we have to be very careful about sustainability, or there will be no one to staff call centers in Mumbia and Manilla when we call to complain about the lack of food.
SHG,
Yes, moderation in all things. It’s a Greek thing.
All the best.
RGK
Swift solved this problem ages ago – use the Irish…
Ahem.
The Pugilistic Leprechauns will not take that!
My second all time favorite food, the other being the other food made of people – spam.
It’s often overlooked, as you seem to have done, that while jobs themselves may have gone “Poof!” the wealth they create hasn’t. The salaries being paid for those workers have just been transferred into the pockets of the top dogs, the C*O crowd. It’s been shown in many studies that wealth in the hands of lower income people (the “regular” workers) does more good for the economy than it does in the hands of more wealthy people. This is simply because the basic definition of an economy is goods/services/*money* being moved around; people with less disposable income spend their money, those with more hoard it and let it “stagnate”
So perhaps we could talk about the “personal responsibility” fueling their greed by accumulating vast sums of wealth thereby **harming the economy for everyone** by eliminating jobs through automation.
Or we could just keep on heaping praise on them and falsely calling them “job creators”
Redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor is many people’s magic unicorn. It fixes things until the money runs out again, but then it’s gone and the poor start bitching again about how unfair it all is and how somebody should take all the money from the rich and give it to them, again.
Yea, except here it’s being redistributed from the poor to the rich.
Redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor is many [rich] people’s magic bugaboo, but what we have happening here is the **exact opposite** flow of money. Which is pretty much what ALWAYS happen while a chorus of the rich gnash their teeth and bemoan the unfairness of them not getting to keep all the toys they unscrupulously took.
I know nothing about these cycles of redistribution and bust you speak of (have an example that’s happened in the US?). I can certainly provide an example of the rich gouging the poor and getting yet more wealthy off their backs: the present. As well as the past. And most certainly the future, too.
Why do you think it ends up that way, money flowing from the poor to the rich? Here’s the good news: when the poor no longer have any money, the rich won’t gouge them anymore. You can’t get blood from a rock.
“Why do you think it ends up that way, money flowing from the poor to the rich?”
I dunno … maybe something about the rich being greedy and callous and unethical and immoral? Something along the lines of “the love of money is the root of all evil”? Maybe?
I’m not surprised you didn’t have an example of the cycles you reference. Nice snark, though (both here and in most of your other replies).
My thoughts are in my post. You felt the need to comment, and I let you. Don’t whine that I didn’t respond to your brilliance as seriously as you think it demanded. Everybody gets your point. It’s not new. It’s not interesting. It’s not thoughtful. But I let your comments post, even though they fell beneath the level of intelligence I hope for. And instead of thanking me, you complain about my snark. Sorry, but that’s all you get. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back.
Comments 101.
Like this, shit for brains.
I’m confused. Are you arguing for redistribution of wealth back to the poor by socialism, communism or a welfare state? Because one of these will definitely fix everything.
You left out armed insurrection, form of authoritarian government to be decided later.
Unlike energy, wealth dissipates. It’s not “poof,” but it will disappear over time. Your premise isn’t overlooked. It’s fundamentally flawed.
I fear Odder was interested in an Occupy SJ dialectic. I may have scared him off by my unwillingness to assume his Marxist premises.
“I fear Odder was interested in an Occupy SJ dialectic.”
Nope. But being dismissive is certainly an easier option that engaging in actual substance. You know, like actually providing an example of the “redistribution and bust cycle” to referred to.
“I may have scared him off by my unwillingness to assume his Marxist premises.”
What an interesting euphemism for literally blocking me from replying on that thread. I generally enjoy reading your blog, but by being so disingenuous when someone disagrees with you (as adults are supposed to be able to do) is making me re-think the value of your analyses.
Literally? Literally, every comment you’ve written has been literally posted. Literally.
As for your re-thinking the value of my analyses, I’m prepared to suffer the loss of your admiration. Literally.
Yes, literally.
You’ve posted my comments, but you have blocked me from replying on that original thread. At this moment I am still unable to reply there. You even came right out and said, “… that’s all you get.”
You know this. You had to take explicit action to do so. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous.
Heh. Try hitting the last reply button. It works the same for you as anybody else, your paranoia notwithstanding. You’re too funny.
Ah, I see how that works now. Not exactly obvious or intuitive, but my mistake and fail nevertheless. I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong.
Now it’s your turn.
That’s very big of you to admit when you’re wrong, particularly when you were so spectacularly and obviously wrong. But I’m afraid your being wrong doesn’t work the way you wish it did.
“It’s fundamentally flawed.”
If so, I would expect you to actually expose those flaws. If you can.
Of course you would. You’re the aggrieved. No one can disagree with you without meeting your demands and explaining it to your satisfaction. You are the center of the universe, and you are entitled to demand that the world bow to your mighty will. That everyone but you recognizes the obvious doesn’t make it sufficient, as it’s all about you.
Sorry, Odder. Try pushing the butthurt button. Literally. Maybe then everyone will take you as seriously as you take yourself.
I’m the aggrieved? Bwahahaha.
Haven’t you noticed that the number of comments on this article by far exceed the number of comments you usually get on an article (normally single digits)? And that nearly all of them are pointing out how you’re “logic” is skewed? Since your responses to most of them consist entirely of snark, I suspect you’re the one really suffering the butthurt. Literally.
I did notice that there are a lot of comment on this post. Could it have to do with the fact that it’s not law-related, and therefore the non-lawyers felt less inhibited about expressing themselves? I also note that of the various challenges, no one agrees with you or finds your contention sufficiently interesting to make it worthy of discussion, though a few have been critical of you.
I’ve also note you, personally, are responsible for 10 comments (as of now) of your own and even more responses, none of which think as highly of you as you do of yourself. Go figure. I think 10 comments by you is enough on my soapbox. So now (aside from your next comment which I’ve already posted), it’s time to put this to rest.
“I also note that of the various challenges, no one agrees with you …”
Pointing out a different way in which your logic is failing is NOT that same as disagreeing with me.
“I’ve also note you, personally, are responsible for 10 comments …”
Which still leaves another 50+ more than you normally get. Almost all of which are telling you that you’re wrong.
“… it’s time to put this to rest.”
Agreed. Since you have yet to respond to the *very first* farcical claim you made with a single example (the redistribute and bust cycle), it’s pretty clear you never will. Night night!
It’s almost like you’re a scorned lover, with that obsessively need to get in the last passive aggressive word so soothe the pain of rejection. Except people come to read SJ and nobody gives a damn that you exist. So sad.
Shh. Let him leave with whatever dignity he can muster.
Speaking of an “with that obsessive [sic] need to get in the last passive aggressive word so [sic] soothe the pain of rejection.”
Such a shame you won’t (or, more likely, can’t) respond to any of the valid points I’ve made or back up your ridiculous claims. That’s what adults usually do rather than resort to snark and insults. Funny that you’re worried about my dignity when you act like that.
“Valid points.” If you do say so yourself. Heh. Oops, sorry to harsh your exit. I value and respect you.
Aw, come on. Now he’s just gonna comment again.
“we pretend some other vast pool of great jobs exist somewhere else, in the mist. They don’t.”
History has shown this to be wrong repeatedly. Why do you think it is true this time?
Evidence:
Today – Total US employment: ~152 million
1950 – Total US employment – 60 million.
Where the hell did those 90 million jobs come from, as automation eliminated millions and free trade eliminated millions more? People created them. What is different about this time? Why will people not continue to create them?
So you missed the whole part about technology and automation that’s happening now? Whatever. Maybe if you ask more silly questions, they will magically turn into jobs. Can’t we just talk our way into a viable economy?
Technology and automation have been happening for thousands of years. Henry Ford doesn’t get to build cars without agricultural processes that have become efficient enough to free up labor from having to produce food. And robots won’t replace labor entirely. If robots are 10 times more efficient at some tasks, and 100 times more efficient at other tasks, then we use people for the former tasks, and robots for the latter.
Well then, I’ll let all those people sitting at home without jobs and let them know robots won’t displace labor “entirely.” Then they won’t feel nearly as bad about things.
… until people figure out that we can use robots to increase consumption, to prop the economy up. Then we’ve taken humans out of the cycle altogether, right?
My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.
You mentioned “personal responsibility” in your post. Tell them to get off there asses and figure out how they fit into the new framework. (Well, you don’t need to tell them, they’ll figure it out.) You don’t see you or I sitting around complaining that there are no jobs now that one person can produce the food that it took 100 people to produce a few hundred years ago.
When there are enough people out of work, not even true grit will be enough. Eventually, it comes down to being able to find a job or create a viable business. When neither is possible, the game is over.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
(skip to the 9:00 mark for the part where lawyers aren’t needed)
And you got so close to the correct answer:
“Much as we adore AI and our shiny iToys, we’ll get bored sitting home, doing nothing…”
so new technologies, distractions, opportunities will arise. Perhaps legal beat poetry, 3D immersion TV, live action dinner theater, fire sculpting, home gene-splicing kits, stuff you (or I) cannot imagine now.
A hundred years ago, it took dusk ’til dawn for most people to support themselves. Now it takes 40 hours a week, and there’s an ever larger group of people producing nothing, and yet still surviving. The question is not what are you going to do to earn a living, but what are you going to do with your leisure time, as the costs of the raw materials you need for your particular drive or hobby keeps falling in terms of working hours?
Some people will want to sit and play minecraft all day, or other useless things. Less power to them. I won’t stop striving until I have my own working, practically safe flying car sitting on the driveway. Are you going to turn your back on your dream because you want to keep LABORING?
Relying on history has always been the palliative. We survived before, therefore we’ll survive again. Which is true until it isn’t. Maybe there will be new industries that arise to keep us amused and fed. Maybe legal beat poetry will be our economic salvation. But there’s no evidence of it.
So, what do you think will happen? We’ve gotten to a point where it takes an astonishingly small fraction of total available human effort to keep everyone clothed, fed, housed, entertained, and in communication with one another. Do you think that in the future it will take a larger fraction of the available human effort to maintain the same material standard of living, or a smaller fraction? If the worst case scenario is that things stop improving, are we in a crisis?
I really enjoy it when someone begs the question, even though they lack the capacity to grasp that they’re doing so, because engaging in mental masturbation based on logical fallacies is so much fun.
I don’t know what will happen. It’s never happened before, so who knows? But it won’t be better because of wishful thinking, empty rhetoric or denial.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure which question is being begged. Is it: “Does it take an astonishingly small fraction of total available human effort to keep everyone…?”
Whether the fraction is small or large is irrelevant to the point. It currently takes a certain amount of human effort to provide all of the goods and services our society consumes. You are positing that if technology and trade reduce the amount of human effort it takes to provide those things, then life will get worse for almost everyone. That is an unlikely outcome.
Perhaps someone else will find you sufficiently interesting to explain why you failed to grasp anything about the post. I do not.
Whether it’s an “astonishingly small fraction” (your begging the question) or not, it has to be paid for somehow. If people can’t afford to buy the things they need, then government has to give it to them. If people can’t pay taxes, then government can’t raise the money to pay for the handouts. Without a viable economy, the amount of human effort involved is irrelevant. Nothing will be produced.
You mean it’s not like one of those science fiction movies where mankind is long dead and the machines just keep working for us forever and ever? Somebody will actually want to get paid to make the machines do their voodoo? Well. That’s not good.
I don’t see how driverless cars and trucks is anything but a coup de grâce to the gasping legal profession. I can’t find the stats, but I believe I read that at least 50% of all lawyers ambulance chase or do insurance defense work. There will be no tears shed, quite the opposite, i know.
An older lawyer told me not to worry and just switch to criminal defense or family law when driverless cars pick up steam …… there will be enough criminal defense and family law work to comfortably absorb all us future ex-ambulance chasers right?
There will be a huge market for free legal services. It will keep you busy, if a little hungry.
ha, well at least i’m used to that. Contributory negligence is a bitch.
I really enjoyed the portion of this post that was above the asterisk. The portion below the asterisk, however, suffers from the Luddite fallacy. Maybe you were writing with tongue-in-cheek, but there is a not insignificant portion of the population that actually suffers from the delusion that technological progress is innately un-good.
A quick primer: “Luddites” were cottage industry hand-weavers by trade who were displaced by the invention and widespread adoption of automated looms in early nineteenth century Britain. In response to their displacement, Luddites raided new textile factories and smashed automated looms; they favored certain (rent seeking) policy responses in Parliament that would have protected their profession at least temporarily at the expense of the greater good for the British population. The way of thinking that bears their name holds that technological progress is bad because it displaces unskilled/low-skilled workers and, accordingly, should be shunned notwithstanding the benefits to the greater population.
Luddites were hand-weavers. They thought that when the automated loom spelled doom for their profession, there would be nothing to replace it. With the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, we know that their concern was silly. In the end, the Luddites suffered some short-term discomfort in an era that knew nothing of public “social safety nets,” but the economy did not crumble and the population continued to grow and get richer as a whole.
I don’t know what our future holds, but the lesson of the past is that technological progress is generally a good thing and that protection of the “old ways” is a bad, often ruinous, policy response to technological change. In the end, I think we’ll all be OK.
Thank you for explaining Luddites, because nobody but you knows anything about them.
So, is that it for your response to my Luddite critique? What say you? Why is it different this time?
Just because you have a keyboard doesn’t mean your “critique” is worthy discussion. It’s not.
K. Good talk.
Jeez, now you make me feel bad, even though your Luddite exposition was insulting. So the reason your critique wasn’t a concern was that the footnote didn’t reflect an inherent anti-technology bias, but that lawyers are subject to the same economic consequences as everyone else. Some mistakenly believe that relatively trivial tech changes will somehow save lawyers, but they add almost nothing to our ability to practice profitably. What we need to survive are paying clients.
Clients willing to spend money on lawyers aren’t there. We have far too many lawyer mouths to feed and far too few paying clients to feed them. It’s not that lawyers are being replaced with tech (though, to some extent, they are, as well as being outsourced), but that the impact of the economy on clients is making it impossible for lawyers to build a sustainable practice. So, the tech impact has little to do with your concern, but with lawyers’ role in the economy as a whole.
I’m a master plumber, your high tech throne will still clog. Win!
You will win, unless I can’t pay you except with cute cat videos.
Retainer agreement.
You forgot the obvious, simple, common sense answer that many feel is right.
Just print more money.
Better yet, in today’s electronic age, we don’t even need to pay people to print it. All it takes is just a few clicks of a button there’s the new money. Now there’s a win win if I ever saw one.
Just ask the Germans in the 1920s. Or the Hungarians after WW II. Or Zimbabwe. What could possibly go wrong when it feels so right.
Exactly! Just like magic!!!
I’m a little more hopeful.
Jobs don’t have to produce physical things.
They don’t need to produce “things” at all.
Certainly not things we need, like food, shelter and clothing.
As evidence, I would point out that FanDuel once employed 400 people.
That plumber will fix your toilet with money some innocent man paid you.
The plumber will buy food (now cheaper due to technology) and make some sports bets.
Fan duel will spend the money on other lawyers, who will spend it on food, porsches and plumbers.
The cycle continues.
Individuals will lose – but the system (hopefully) always wins
That plumber will fix your toilet FOR money.
Oops
Loved the post though.
Now I have to do math again.
Do you think Fan Duel can support a national economy? A thousand Fan Duel’s? A million?
I think Fan Duel is an example of how money can keep churning without a “product”.
I’m not denying that your prediction is possible, just that there are other possibilities.
I used Fan Duel because it is so ridiculous, yet provides jobs.
It works on the basis of millions of dumb people providing money to a few smart people – yet…jobs!
I understood your example. Your point about money churning is what we’ve been doing for the past decade or so, where money flows in a circle of non-productive service jobs, a little bit siphoned off with each pass, until it’s gone. Can everyone make a living selling nothing to each other? Can it last forever? With the introduction of technology, and each time around the circle fewer people are needed, what happens to the people who fall out of the bottom when there’s no place left for them to go?
We’ve always assumed (as do so many of the people commenting here) that *something* new will appear to fill the gap. Historically, it’s happened. Will it happen again? Will our magical exceptionalism always save us from ourselves?
One can only hope.
Lawyers and Tax Guys will either be the first or last to go.
I’m not an economist, so a lot of this is Underpants Gnome theory.
A very interesting post, though I think you’re a little too pessimistic, assuming there isn’t some tongue in cheek involved based on your responses, but you miss a key point, in a sufficiently automated society, money is obsolete. If no person had to work to get food to your plate, there is no need to pay for it. It’s just a matter of surviving the transitory process.
If you have a robot that can perform all necessary forms of labor such as farming, plumbing, driving, mining etc. up to and including production and maintenance of other robots, then all humans can be born into retirement, assuming the robots don’t decide we are obsolete and boot us off the planet. The only question is whether we all nuke ourselves into oblivion or starve to dearth before we reach a fully automated society.
Should we all stay home, watch cat videos, and wait for the robots to bring us dinner?
All that extra time to get that dreamed for masters degrees in gender studies.
It will only make you sad you didn’t get it when there were still jobs requiring it.
CTRL-ALT-REVOLT!
Google “Post-Scarcity Economy”. That’s the end game of what you are looking at, and it’s an issue science-fiction writers have been wrestling with for several decades, and economists even longer. The most-likely form will be some kind of communism. Remember that the stuff being produced by robots instead of human labor is still there–the wealth hasn’t gone ‘poof’. We just need to figure out a new way to allocate it, and to re-value what humans do.
It’s the transition from a scarcity-based, mostly capitalist economy to a post-scarcity economy that looks like it is going to be rough, as it involves upending all the values and customs about how the economy should work that have been embedded in our psyches for generations.
I would have thought socialism, until we ran out of yummy children.
No, really, the wealth does all go “Poof!” Really. It MUST otherwise the article makes no sense.
Robots as well as computers still have to have people input data that tells them what to do. In the new society, perhaps each robot will have a human “minder” or babysitter, if you will.
As for plumbers and other trades, show me a robot who’s going to stick it’s head under a sink, move all the cleaning supplies out of the way and install a new water supply line or p-trap and then clean up after they’re done with the work.
It’s not that there would be no jobs, but there will be substantially fewer jobs than people, necessarily leaving a lot of people unemployed and broke. The cost of keeping them alive, housed and healthy, however, will be an untenable drain on the economy.
That’s why I always tell young people forget the fancy degree. Learn a trade and you will always be able to make a living. That, or go into computer programming. Someone has to program all those robots and computers.
When the fancy degree pays off, it’s great. And it should be. But nobody, lawyers and doctors included, are immune from the overarching economic forces.
I’ve had the same thoughts rolling around my brain for awhile. My sense here is that automation of a large number of blue collar jobs (and some white collar ones as well) is going to accelerate wildly in the next few years for two reasons: the ability and the will.
The ability: we now have the technology (very fast computers + a mature image/video recognition industry + a mature robotics industry) to do some truly amazing sci-fi things. We’re just starting to figure out all the cool things we can do by combining the three.
The will: Economic pressure for increased wages, higher liability costs, millennials (mostly kidding), weak unions, competition has cut costs by doing it, etc. make it more and more attractive for companies to consider replacing elements of their work force. Hell, as I type this, I’m already thinking of a dozen pitches – predictible, scalable, reliable, replaceable, upgradeable, whatever-able, etc.
My belief is that these factors will end up having us recreate the all-the-jobs-went-overseas event, but this time, it will be all-the-jobs-went-to-robots. Companies will be forced into it for the exact same reasons – their competition did it, cut costs, and they are no longer competitive.
And like you stated – these jobs won’t be coming back either. The impact here is very much TBD. I have no idea how that will mature.
I for one look forward to serving our new robotic overlords.
PS: I am still waiting for the personal consumer helicopter that Popular Mechanics promised we would have by the 90’s. I am still pretty pissed off about that one.
Somewhat on the opposite of the spectrum, we have Frederik Pohl’s “The Midas Plague”
What if you were REQUIRED to regularly meet a consumption quota?
From the link:
“In their leisure time, people undertake activities that we normally call productive – like designing a machine! But lower strata of society is so busy consuming, they’ve no leisure time. Lower middle classes can afford no more than a few hours of such leisure time each week – they’ve to spend so much time consuming!”
http://variety-sf.blogspot.com/2008/06/frederik-pohl-midas-plague-novella.html
Don’t see what this has to do with jobs, or was this just a “cool dystopian science fiction” thing?
Everything that I or you post is “cool”, except sometimes I’m not so sure about you.**
The alternative to Loss of jobs to machines, is not necessarily that the downtrodden becoming more downtrodden because of lack of money – no work to be paid for, is that we produce too many goods. The Unicrns dancing solution is that people can now choose not to work and produce whatever esthetic “stuff” they want. But someone still needs to consume all the “good Stuff” (crap?) that the super efficient robot factories produce, hence the evolution of Pohl’s super consumer.
**from the old saying:
“All fisherman are liars, except you and me. And I’m not too sure about you.”
I hate it when someone says I might be “cool.” Too much pressure.
I shall remember that, dude.
Don’t worry. The value of humans will never be exactly zero, because humans are full of hydrocarbons that have intrinsic value as a fuel source for all those robots.
At current prices, the chemical value of an adult human body is roughly $3.50
Oh, and there’s another force driving automation at McDonald’s: The 15 sexual harassment complaints recently reported in the news. Robots don’t file sexual harassment complaints.
Just wait until the 2050 Title IX Guidance from the OCR…