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

14 JUN 2013

 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...
  2  notes

Economists misunderstood the value of information and material goods in the information revolutions.

28 MAY 2013

 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...
  1  notes

Humans are mostly cheap robots.

17 MAY 2013

 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...
Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
  1  notes

If machines can do everything for us by 2045, what will we do?

17 MAY 2013

 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...
Folksonomies: automation unemployment
Folksonomies: automation unemployment
 1  1  notes

A cautionary tale of how automation is running people out of employment.

04 JAN 2012

 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...
Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
  1  notes

They cannot drive trucks yet, but how long until they can?

04 JAN 2012

 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 ...
  1  notes

And how it does it so fast.

04 JAN 2012

 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...
  1  notes

To conduct discovery. Because humans get bored and only have a 60 percent success rate.

04 JAN 2012

 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.
Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
  1  notes

Everytime you purchase something online, that's something you didn't purchase from a retail clerk.

04 JAN 2012

 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...
Folksonomies: writing automation
Folksonomies: writing automation
  1  notes

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.

04 JAN 2012

 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.
Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
  1  notes

He predicts technological progress will outrun the pace for which we can find new uses for labor in 1930.

04 JAN 2012

 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-...
  1  notes

As people are automated out of jobs, society must increase their educations in order to keep them on top of the machines.

04 JAN 2012

 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...
Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
  1  notes

Because the workers automated out of jobs can't buy things.

04 JAN 2012

 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...
Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
  1  notes

People in semi-skilled jobs have been the ones most automated out of jobs, while highly-technical and more menial jobs have remained.

04 JAN 2012

 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...
  1  notes

How cars replacing horses reduces their populations.



References

14 JUN 2013

 White Collars Turn Blue

Periodicals>Newsletter Article:  Krugman, Paul (September 29, 1996), White Collars Turn Blue, New York Times, Retrieved on 2013-06-14
  • Source Material [www.nytimes.com]
  • Folksonomies: futurism
    Folksonomies: futurism
     2  
    25 MAY 2013

     2312

    Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Robinson, Kim Stanley (2012-05-22), 2312, Orbit, Retrieved on 2013-05-25
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  •  14  
    17 MAY 2013

     Who Owns the Future?

    Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Lanier, Jaron (2013-05-07), Who Owns the Future?, Simon & Schuster, Retrieved on 2013-05-17
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: computers
    Folksonomies: computers
     10  
    17 MAY 2013

     The Consequences of Machine Intelligence

    Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article:  Vardi, Moshe (10/25/2012), The Consequences of Machine Intelligence, The Atlantic, Retrieved on 2013-05-17
  • Source Material [www.theatlantic.com]
  • Folksonomies: automation
    Folksonomies: automation
     1  
    04 JAN 2012

     Race Against the Machine

    Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Brynjolfsson , Erik and McAfee , Andrew (2011), Race Against the Machine, Digital Frontier Press, Lexington, Massachusetts, Retrieved on 2012-01-04
  • Source Material [raceagainstthemachine.com]
  •  11  
    04 JAN 2012

     A Farewell to Alms

    Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Clark , Gregory (2008-12-29), A Farewell to Alms, Princeton Univ Pr, Retrieved on 2012-01-04
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  • Folksonomies:
    Folksonomies:
     1  
    04 JAN 2012

     Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren

    Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Keynes , John Maynard (1987-04), Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, Retrieved on 2012-01-04
  • Source Material [www.econ.yale.edu]
  • Folksonomies: political science
    Folksonomies: political science
     1  
    04 JAN 2012

     Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

    Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article:  Markoff, John (2011), Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software, New York Times, Retrieved on 2012-01-04
  • Source Material [www.nytimes.com]
  • Folksonomies: technology automation
    Folksonomies: technology automation
     1  
    04 JAN 2012

     The new division of labor

    Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Levy , Frank and Murnane , Richard J. (2004), The new division of labor, Princeton University Press, Retrieved on 2012-01-04
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies:
    Folksonomies:
     1