Automating Ourselves Out of Employment
As we automate people out of work, how will will deal with the unemployment? The science fiction utopia of a post-scarcity society can't work in a Capitalist system. How will we deal with the fact that fewer and fewer monopolists will control all the resources and have less and less need for employees?
Alternative Titles:
- The Post-Scarcity Distopia
Folksonomies: employment automation
Memes
Prediction Errors for the Information Age
Perhaps the best way to describe the flawed vision of fin de siecle futurists is to say that, with few exceptions, they expected the coming of an ''immaculate'' economy -- one in which people would be largely emancipated from any grubby involvement with the physical world. The future, everyone insisted, would bring an ''information economy'' that would mainly produce intangibles. The good jobs would go to ''symbolic analysts,'' who would push icons around on computer screens; knowledge, rathe...Economists misunderstood the value of information and material goods in the information revolutions.
The Majority do Robot Work
Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the irrigation canals or robots, install things, fix things. Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anythi...Humans are mostly cheap robots.
Does the Future Need Us?
While we now know that Turing was too optimistic on the timeline, AI's inexorable progress over the past 50 years suggests that Herbert Simon was right when he wrote in 1956 "machines will be capable ... of doing any work a man can do." I do not expect this to happen in the very near future, but I do believe that by 2045 machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do. Bill Joy's question deserves therefore not to...If machines can do everything for us by 2045, what will we do?
Kodak, Instagram, and Automation
Here’s a current example of the challenge we face... At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-clas...A cautionary tale of how automation is running people out of employment.
Computers Can't Do Everything
The … truck driver is processing a constant stream of [visual, aural, and tactile] information from his environment. … To program this behavior we could begin with a video camera and other sensors to capture the sensory input. But executing a left turn against oncoming traffic involves so many factors that it is hard to imagine discovering the set of rules that can replicate a driver’s behavior. … Articulating [human] knowledge and embedding it in software for all but highly structured situa...They cannot drive trucks yet, but how long until they can?
How IBM's Watson Pattern-Matches to Answer Trivia
The way Watson plays the game also requires massive amounts of pattern matching. The supercomputer has been loaded with hundreds of millions of unconnected digital documents, including encyclopedias and other reference works, newspaper stories, and the Bible. When it receives a question, it immediately goes to work to figure out what is being asked (using algorithms that specialize in complex communication), then starts querying all these documents to find and match patterns in search of the ...And how it does it so fast.
Lawyers Replaced by Computers
In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000. … “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.” The computers see...To conduct discovery. Because humans get bored and only have a 60 percent success rate.
Online Shopping Replaces Sales People
During the Great Recession, nearly 1 in 12 people working in sales in America lost their job, accelerating a trend that had begun long before. In 1995, for example, 2.08 people were employed in “sales and related” occupations for every $1 million of real GDP generated that year. By 2002 (the last year for which consistent data are available), that number had fallen to 1.79, a decline of nearly 14 percent.Everytime you purchase something online, that's something you didn't purchase from a retail clerk.
Computers and Creative Writing
And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses. Apparent exceptions here only prove the rule. A prankster used an online generator of abstracts for computer science papers to create a submission that was accepted for a technical conference (in fact, the organizers invited the “author” to chair a panel), but the abstract was simply a series of somew...A computer successfully got a paper accepted to a technical conference by stringing technical jargon together, which is similar to a scientist who once got a nonsense post-modernist paper published in a journal, but computers can write sports news stories due to their formulaic nature.
Keynes Predicts Unemployment from Automation
We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.He predicts technological progress will outrun the pace for which we can find new uses for labor in 1930.
The Population Must Increase Education to Stay Ahead of T...
...the relative demand for skilled labor is closely correlated with advances in technology, particularly digital technologies. Hence, the moniker “skill-biased technical change,” or SBTC. There are two distinct components to recent SBTC. Technologies like robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized inventory control, and automatic transcription have been substituting for routine tasks, displacing those workers. Meanwhile other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high-...As people are automated out of jobs, society must increase their educations in order to keep them on top of the machines.
Shifting From Labor to Capital Reduces Demands
Finally, it’s easy to see how a shift in income from labor to capital would lead to a similar reduction in overall demand. Capitalists tend to save more of each marginal dollar than laborers. In the short run, a transfer from laborers to capitalists reduces total consumption, and thus total GDP. This phenomenon is summarized in a classic though possibly apocryphal story: Ford CEO Henry Ford II and United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther are jointly touring a modern auto plant. Ford...Because the workers automated out of jobs can't buy things.
The U-Shape of Automation
As we look ahead, we see these three trends not only accelerating but also evolving. For instance, new research by David Autor and David Dorn has put an interesting twist on the SBTC story. They find that the relationship between skills and wages has recently become U-shaped. In the most recent decade, demand has fallen most for those in the middle of the skill distribution. The highest-skilled workers have done well, but interestingly those with the lowest skills have suffered less than thos...People in semi-skilled jobs have been the ones most automated out of jobs, while highly-technical and more menial jobs have remained.
The Decline of the Horse
There was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boa...How cars replacing horses reduces their populations.