Jobless and Staying That Way
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The article says that the solution is "more training" in institutions (and thus more debt for the unemployed) because "their jobs are not coming back".
More training in WHAT? The lost jobs were not making buggy whips, a pointless task for which there is simply no demand any longer because horse drawn carriages are obsolete.
The lost jobs have been in manufacturing which has been shipped overseas to countries with no enforced labor wage or environmental laws with which we, a country with enforced labor, wage, and environmental laws, can not possibly compete. The jobs did not become obsolete, they were shipped to a location where they can be done cheaper because they can be done without regard to human rights or the cost to the environment of dumping toxins straight into rivers and oceans.
These jobs are not gone because they are not needed. They are gone because they are being done by slave labor. Paid labor with benefits and a living wage costs more than slave labor and will always cost more, no matter how much "training" is done. Slave labor being cheaper is not a problem that putting people further into debt through "training" will solve. But it does have the effect of wasting time and effort, enslaving our own population through further debt, increasing government power as they get to control, regulate, tax and fund it all, and increase the income and power of bankers benefiting from no risk guaranteed student loans.
Call me negative but I hear that often and don't share the optimism. There is an upper limit to how many office workers and programmers an economy needs - and can sustain at wages enabling the living standards that we've come to expect.
The only big technical revolution that I see coming in the next few decades will be the robot revolution. Now go figure how that will affect the job market.
My opinion is that the current system of wealth distribution will have to be reconsidered quite fundamentally when robots begin to replace the low-wage workforce.
I also think this will not go smoothly, because when have such large changes ever gone smoothly in history...
Feel free to disagree, call me a "dreamer" and my robot story "absurd" - I'm used to that. But looking at what robots can do today (cf. ASIMO) I'm deeply convinced it's going to happen, and much sooner than most people expect.
I mean, the difference between science fiction and reality is primarily that the robots we have, so far, look nothing like humans. but the part about them replacing workers, that's been true for a very long time now.
Yes, I'm thinking of a bigger magnitude, though.
As naive as that may sound, I do believe in the "service bot" vision where households and workplaces are increasingly stuffed with robots. There's of course still a long way to go. But when I look at the individual pieces that are available today (see videos below) then I tend to, perhaps naively, expect the first robots capable of taking over simplistic jobs (outside of industrial environments) within a 15-20 year timeframe. And not long thereafter before it becomes cost effective to actually deploy them on a large scale.
When that happens then it will likely be a different quality from what we've seen in industrialism before. It's not about machines reducing the workforce in certain industries. It's about machines replacing human labor as a whole in entire segments - not least in the service-sector.
I'm deriving my guesstimate from the fact that what we see today is the result of the past circa 20 years of research. Add another 20yrs to that and the mind is blown, at least mine is.
With regard to "not a new idea" you have a point in theory. Yet in practice, when I listen to political discussions then I don't hear anyone having it on the radar, even when they talk about the so-called "longterm".
Perhaps I'm expecting too much, politicians rarely look further ahead than 10yrs anyways. I just wonder when we'll begin to seriously question the paradigm of "everyone has a job" which dominates everything today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ByGQGiVMg#t=3m32s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiw-jbjnyzc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyPAIpXm-nU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrmrU7P-ysA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwhPLeIq4uY
and really, I know people who use irobot products; I mean, it's still very much version .9 beta, from what I understand, it doesn't pick up your stuff and put it somewhere you can't find it like a real housekeeper does, but we'll get there.
I guess I don't see how obsoleting the housekeeper or the barista is any more disruptive than obsoleting the assembly line worker.
People fearing that technology will obsolete them is as old as technology itself. It is said that the etymology of the word 'sabotage' can be traced back to the Netherlands in the 15th century when workers would throw their sabots (wooden shoes) into the wooden gears of the textile looms to break the cogs, feeling the automated machines would render the human workers obsolete. wikipedia also points out this is unverified... however, workers fearing competition from machines is not a new thing. sure, when the economy is good, everyone loves automation, as it tends to increase productivity and thus wages, and people who are automated away can be productively used elsewhere. When the economy is shit, though, like it is now, people tend to fear and hate automation, because when the economy is shit, rather than driving up wages, the increased productivity just replaces the least-productive workers.
I mean, yeah, things are changing faster than they were before... but really, it's the same problem that the 15th century textile workers had.
As time goes on and our technology advances, yeah, more and more people are largely idle. Very few people actually have to work to obtain food for everyone. But we come up with new things to do. I use the example of my sister, who got a degree in fine arts... I mean, she paints (and her paintings are certainly very interesting) and she makes expensive coffee for people, (and hey, I enjoy expensive coffee) but my point is that she went to school for four years (and is now trying to get into graduate school) studying for a job that nobody rationally expects to provide a comfortable living. I'm not saying it's a bad choice... but if we did not have a whole lot of spare capacity, it wouldn't be a choice at all.
And hell, look at all the people in the advertising industry, convincing people to buy products they don't need. There will be new industries in the future.
The retraining cycle is shorter than it has ever been before, true, but I think most of the problems we're seeing right now are because our economy is broken for other reasons, not because of the pace of productivity improvement.
Yes. It's quite hard to operate a robot safely and reliably in an environment that was designed for humans. Especially when said humans may be around at the same time, displacing stuff, walking around, complaining when the robot pours something boiling hot over them by accident, etc.
Once that is completely solved, though, you're looking at plain old math and market forces. If a robot gets the job done and is cheaper - guess who gets the job.
I guess I don't see how obsoleting the housekeeper or the barista is any more disruptive than obsoleting the assembly line worker.
I think you forget that the assembly line worker has not really been obsoleted. They have merely been reduced during industrialism and are now being outsourced to india. But many people are still employed at an assembly line. Quite likely the pants or shirt you are wearing were sewed in Bangladesh, on a slave labor assembly line.
Imho the industrial revolution will pale in contrast to the robot revolution. Think about what happens when these assembly jobs really go away. When robots are advanced enough to perform generic, finicky or complex tasks cheaper than humans.
I don't think baristas and housekeepers account for much there.
But how about transportation, manufacturing, construction, military, nursing (already happening in japan), agriculture, cleaning (who likes cleaning?), pick & pack...
right... the roboticized McDonalds, well, I'd envision it looking more like a vending machine than a current McDonalds with androids walking around.
This is where Asimov got it wrong... It's easier to build robots into the things they automate than to build general-purpose 'human like' robots that can operate things the way humans do. It''s better to make robots that are decidedly non-human, and even that look decidedly non-robotic, In fact. Having a human-like shape and a human-like brain would be a liability, in most cases. Why do you need a full human-emulation to slap my logo on a hundred T shirts? You don't.
I think that most of the work at McDonalds, actually, is done by robots already. I mean, the people on the location mostly just reheat mostly pre-molded and pre-cooked stuff. I bet that the over sized vending machine I describe could do this job cheaper now (especially where land is expensive.) - I bet it's cultural issues that prevent the vending machine approach; people have negative associations with vending machine food, and people like being served by other humans.
>I think you forget that the assembly line worker has not really been obsoleted. They have merely been reduced during industrialism and are now being outsourced to india. But many people are still employed at an assembly line. Quite likely the pants or shirt you are wearing were sewed in Bangladesh, on a slave labor assembly line.
Hati and Mexico, actually, I just looked, so yeah, you have a strong point. I believe the turning point here, though, will be when wealth is equalized a bit more, meaning workers in india demand a little more money rather than when robots get cheaper.
On the other hand, I think that if wages were more equal, we have the technology to automate away most of the human involvement in manufacturing. I also have some shirts made in the USA... do you want to bet that American Apparel uses fewer man hours to complete a T shirt than the Haitian company that made the shirt I'm wearing now? Considering that bulk American Apparel shirts usually aren't even twice as expensive as the shirts manufactured in Haiti, I would imagine that they are using a whole lot more automation.
Incidentally, the Haitian made shirt I'm wearing now? my company logo was printed on it by a company running out of the USA. As I chose the cheapest printing I could find without regard to the country the work was being done in, I imagine the American factory doing that screen printing was extremely well-automated.
But my point is that the robotic revolution is here. It has been accelerating for some time now, but it's not a new thing.
The thing is, this 'robotic revolution' won't be heralded by walking into McDonalds and seeing commander data manning the deep fryer. The human shape and the human brain is a very general purpose tool, so optimized shapes for particular jobs will always be the most efficient way to build robots, outside of social constraints.
We'll have to disagree on this.
I think robots will become pervasive almost "overnight" once we can build them generic enough to replace, for example, those guys in the sweatshops. Or the burger flippers in the backroom at McD.
A sweatshop worker can quickly learn to sew a new kind of design, even if that involves using different or new tools. Purpose built sewing machines are probably only flexible within very tight constraints.
A McD worker can quickly learn to cook a new meal or operate the new oven. A fully automatic kitchen would likely need a serious overhaul (in all locations where it was deployed) when the food designers come up with something new.
When you have a "mechanic intern" tho, who works almost as well as a really dense low-wage guy, can also learn new things, but costs only half in maintenance, and never sleeps... What's not to like?
I believe the turning point here, though, will be when wealth is equalized a bit more, meaning workers in india demand a little more money rather than when robots get cheaper.
Now we're back at where we started, but that's okay and perhaps a nice way to let go of this thread. :-)
As said, I believe the indian sweatshops won't even be competitive against generic bots at their current rates. Much less when they demand more.. (Oh, did I mention that robots never go on strike? ;-) )
[1]http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/08/manufacturing-output-per...
To compensate the US could tariff everything imported from China to compensate for the artificially low exchange rate. The advantage to manufacture in China would be diminished. All of our material crap we buy would get more expensive too. Eventually China will let their currency float making them richer and us poorer, in terms of buying power, and stuff will be made in the US again. So the situation will correct itself. In the mean time its very hard for the people finding themselves without jobs.
You're also, I think, focusing too much on the labor input into manufacturing and farming. We're doing very well in those sectors, but not with a whole lot of labor.
In fact, fantastically decreasing the labor in farming was thought to be a good thing, and from the viewpoints of my parents, who were born in the early to mid '30s and who grew up on farms, I can assure that's largely true on the micro scale....
It's not the existence of backbreaking labor that makes creating things valuable, it's the fact that things are being created which have value and which can be sold. Ultimately sold to people with oil and gas perhaps. There's only so many banking services they need for their petrodollars.
Involving ordinary people in manufacturing endeavors keeps them from committing crimes during the hours they are awake, and provides them with an income which supports industries such as services which are greatly dependent on volume of services provided. Services mentioned like firefighting and police and teachers depend on taxes which depend on income of the general populace, only a few of which are CEOs who live in ivory towers with gilded gates; or depend on volume such as tax preparation and retail sales. In either case you need the general population to be employed doing something. That something can be productive or not. If not productive, the economy collapses on itself as it finds itself unable to import things it needs because it has nothing of value to trade.
The gentleman made a comment that services jobs are being lost as well. Yes, but that is a direct consequence of the loss of manufacturing jobs which create actual goods of value using many people, who then are able to direct some of the income generated from goods creation to support these other secondary dependent industries.
(Not entirely relevant, but don't forget that we're still manufacturing a lot of stuff with no particular decline in the sector (or at least until the Great Recession), just with much less labor.)