Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Altman sees the problem, but is vague about what to do about it.

He's right that this is a new thing. It's not "software", per se, it's automation in general. For almost all of human history, the big problem was making enough stuff. Until about 1900 or so, 80-90% of the workforce made stuff - agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. That number went below 50% some time after WWII. It's continued to drop. Today, it's 16% in the US.[1] Yet US manufacturing output is higher than ever.

Post-WWII, services took up the slack and employed large numbers of people. Retail is still 9% of employment. That's declining, probably more rapidly than the BLS estimate. Online ordering is the new normal. Amazon used to have 33,000 employees at the holiday season peak. They're converting to robots.

After making stuff and selling stuff, what's left? The remaining big employment areas in the US:

  State and local government, 13%. 
   That's mostly teachers, cops, and healthcare. 
   (The Federal government is only 1.4%).
  Health care and social assistance, 11%.
  Professional and business services, 11%.
   (Not including IT; that's only 2%) 
  Leisure and hospitality, 8%
  Self-employed, 6%.

That's about 50% of the workforce. All those areas are growing, sightly. For now, most of those are difficult to automate. That's what the near future looks like.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm [2] http://deadmalls.com/

* Until about 1900 or so, 80-90% of the workforce made stuff - agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. That number went below 50% some time after WWII. It's continued to drop. Today, it's 16% in the US.[1] Yet US manufacturing output is higher than ever.*

I find this point interesting and wonder about it sometimes: does making a movie count as "stuff?" An operating system? A novel? I can see good arguments for both sides and am not asking the question antagonistically. Even among things that unambiguously "stuff"—like cars—much of their value now comes in the form of software.

The real issue may be Baumol's Cost Disease. Stuff is cheaper because of efficiency but services (teaching, doctoring) is very expensive because it isn't. Tyler Cowen discusses extensively the hard-to-automate areas in The Great Stagnation, which is worth reading.

I don't think it's possible to figure it out with the knowledge we have today.

Just like 50 years ago no one would've predicted that "social media manager with knowledge of WordPress and Drupal" was a job.

For what it's worth, US labor participation rate is still way above its historic lows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Labor_Participation_Rat...

So from the lowest number in the mid 50s to the highest number end of the 20th century, it looks like an 9% span, and we're close to 3% below the all-time high right now.

Doesn't that big climb in the 60s and 70s represent women's large-scale entry into the workforce?

I'm also thinking about the whole under-employment thing that's going on. There's too many people I know who are employed, but part-time or getting paid a lot less than they were in the past.

To me under-employment is the "new normal" after dominant sectors requiring people to be present precisely at the same place at the same time (factories, retail) are lowering hiring numbers.

To think of it, it's quite everyday in many other (frequently high-paid) occupations. A dentist whose appointment book is not booked to the max or a CPA who has tons of business in March-April, but few billable hours in August, would technically be under-employed.

The point of the article is that no one knows what to do about it, and maybe we should start thinking ahead to plan for crises before they occur.

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