We already experienced automation for decades. Has that lead to higher unemployment? If not, why will it lead to that in the future?
The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
151–160 of 245 posts
Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the people sitting around the house will probably notice that they're not happy, and seek out other things to do. I think the main reason people on welfare don't currently do much is that they can't afford the alternatives. There are also class cultural differences that can make it difficult for them, but I think there are ways to address this. More generally, I think in the absence of material problems, we w…
>And then those children age in a world where they never have to stop being children. That is a truly horrific thought.
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Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the existence of jobs you could quickly retrain to is an eternal law of nature :-(
No, but at the moment there are many such jobs. Maid, cook, child care, a significant amount of construction labor, etc. I blogged about this a while back. Until robots do all the jobs that are actually done in India (e.g. robot cooks, robot maids, robot cigarette walas), there still exist jobs people can do. Americans just refuse to do them, since it's easier to not work. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robo…
Those jobs are impossible without a very high inequality. In the first world, there is a much smaller gap between the average wage and the minimum allowed wage than in India, making impossible many jobs that are time intensive with low revenue.
An engineer can have a cook and a driver if they make ten times as much as a cook or a driver; this arrangement doesn't really work if a typical engineer makes e.g. two or three times as much.
Yes, there would be a larger total demand for labor if we allowed the price to drop below that. But we don't. As we cut off the market to allow only transactions above the "livable wage" price floor, then at that price level we have a surplus of labor supply and a lack of demand.
Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I don't understand your point in the historical context. Original labour conditions in factories were horrible. The conditions did not improve through economic rationalization but because society recognized it as wrong and forced factory owners to employ better working conditions.
Working conditions for programmers though have become amazingly good without unions or government intervention, just through competition for workers. See the perk inflation in Silicon Valley in the Google years, or just wage inflation in general.
Yes, we can only wonder what amount of value programmers could capture if they had any more leverage at the wage negotiation table. Given that the stereotypical engineer is half-ashamed to ask for a raise and is half-embarrased to admit he gets paid I can only imagine the current wage levels - although driven by supply and demand in programmers favour - are breadcrumbs when compared to the true value generated.
Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone can cook. Will people pay me a living wage to cook? Will that wage cover lost income from being on government programs? Does cooking (given the relative difficulty of becoming wealthy doing so) provide an income ceiling higher than getting paid via welfare/Social Security? There is plenty of work to be done. It's just not paid work. How do you propose to coerce people to pay for this work?
I propose to replace welfare/disability fraud/etc with a guarantee job (FDR style) that pays in-kind benefits. I.e., if you claim you can't find a job, the government will give you a job fixing our crumbling infrastructure, providing child care for working women, or similar things. In return you get a room in a government dormitory, a healthy meal from the government cafeteria, a government track suit, etc. Now the "…
I don't want my children to be taken care of by people forced by the government to work. I would want them to enjoy that work AND be skilled in it.
Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but at the moment there are many such jobs. Maid, cook, child care, a significant amount of construction labor, etc. I blogged about this a while back. Until robots do all the jobs that are actually done in India (e.g. robot cooks, robot maids, robot cigarette walas), there still exist jobs people can do. Americans just refuse to do them, since it's easier to not work. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robo…
> there still exist jobs [like maid, cook, child care] people can do. Americans just refuse to do them In many cases Americans refuse to hire them, for cultural reasons that may be the flip side of Americans refusing to do them. Child care is one that there seems to be a lot of (at least, one hears about it a lot), but maid, cook, butler, and even general handyman are positions that many Americans won't consider hiri…
This is an interesting hypothesis - a culturally imposed minimum wage. I'm a bit suspicious because I don't see much evidence of a floor. For example, people seem quite willing to hire Mexicans outside home depo for relatively low wages.
The common solution to sticky nominal wages is economic stimulus; inflate away real wages to trick people into hiring at lower real wages. Do you think that would fix this issue?
Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone can cook. Will people pay me a living wage to cook? Will that wage cover lost income from being on government programs? Does cooking (given the relative difficulty of becoming wealthy doing so) provide an income ceiling higher than getting paid via welfare/Social Security? There is plenty of work to be done. It's just not paid work. How do you propose to coerce people to pay for this work?
I propose to replace welfare/disability fraud/etc with a guarantee job (FDR style) that pays in-kind benefits. I.e., if you claim you can't find a job, the government will give you a job fixing our crumbling infrastructure, providing child care for working women, or similar things. In return you get a room in a government dormitory, a healthy meal from the government cafeteria, a government track suit, etc. Now the "…
There is no way I would trust someone to mind a child if they are being forced to do it.
Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but at the moment there are many such jobs. Maid, cook, child care, a significant amount of construction labor, etc. I blogged about this a while back. Until robots do all the jobs that are actually done in India (e.g. robot cooks, robot maids, robot cigarette walas), there still exist jobs people can do. Americans just refuse to do them, since it's easier to not work. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robo…
Those jobs are impossible without a very high inequality. In the first world, there is a much smaller gap between the average wage and the minimum allowed wage than in India, making impossible many jobs that are time intensive with low revenue. An engineer can have a cook and a driver if they make ten times as much as a cook or a driver; this arrangement doesn't really work if a typical engineer makes e.g. two or thr…
India has lower income inequality than the US. Your hypothesis seems falsified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#159Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…
I think the counterargument here is that if you don't need to move humans to work and back home again every day, and if you don't need to optimize workplace conditions for humans - by providing creature comforts and safety equipment - your unemployed human is using much less resources than a working human, and the robot is also using much less resources than a working human, so the sum of unemployed human + working r…
>Otherwise, to minimize resource usage, let's all give up on civilization and go back to caves.
We can't go back, unless we are willing to kill off most of the population. If we give up just one hundred years of technology we have to destroy every forest in an attempt to grow enough food. All seven billion humans giving up on society and going back to a hunter/gathered society would lead to an immediate collapse of most ecosystems.
We are certainly consuming too much to be substainable right now, but at the same time the amazing efficiency improvements that civilization has brought us are the only thing that make it even possible to live on this planet with seven billion other humans.
Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there won't massive amounts of laid off Truckers sitting around. Young workers used to take those jobs, though. The young (especially men) are underemployed right now. If you're right, they are the ones hurt the most in the long run by automation.
I think the better question is why don't/haven't Millennials taken those jobs as previous generations did. This is a problem that has occurred outside of the technology debate.
There has actually been quite a bit of discussion around this. Here's one article discussing it [1]. It's a combination of factors including low pay for the number of hours worked, social stigma/low respect, huge amount of time away from home/fun activities, and the fact that driving just kind of sucks. Also, as another commenter mentioned, trucking companies have not made it all that easy to get started from zero skill/certification recently.
[1] http://www.overdriveonline.com/trucking-or-not-with-the-twen...