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The rise of the useless class

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Re: The rise of the useless class

#71

Post by twinkletwinkle »

dantheman wrote: post #69
unityByFreedom wrote: post #67

> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40." I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education. Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existenc…

I think you'd find very few republicans favoring UBI...

Actually lots of them do, because they see it as a way to remove "entitlements". Delete food stamps, delete welfare, delete all aspects of the social safety net, and implement a simple UBI. It's the same regressive strategy as "do your taxes on a postcard". Treat every equally, not equitably.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#72

Post by dantheman »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #8
yomly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems convenient to blame technology, and it is definitely going to be the bigger cause in the long term. This said, I am strongly of the opinion that globalization is not a force that benefits everyone (to put it nicely) and it is not constructive that this opinion is not discussed more widely without having to pussyfoot around dirty words like protectionism and nationalism as if they are automatically bad words.

Globalization is centralization: finance is centralized in New York and London; manufacturing is centralized in China and Germany; IT outsourcing is centralized in India. Over the 19th and early 20th century, the benefits of American westward expansion and the development of the industrial Midwest largely accrued to the big banks in New York. The same is occurring, just on a larger scale and accelerated due to leaps…

The US manufactures more than it ever did, page 2 of this pdf shows it quite clearly: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42135.pdf

The US is more than double Germany.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#73

Post by mjmahone17 »

return0 wrote: post #65
charles-salvia wrote: post #30

I can't help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking, humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full "general intelligence" to make "common-sense" decisions. Despite recent advances in machine-learning (i.e. adding more layers to neural networks, i.e. adding more columns to a matrix), we don't really have anything that even approaches an artificial general intelligence…

I can think of cooking as an example of a surprisingly complicated job. OTOH i can think of many supposedly "creative" jobs that are already ripe for disruption. Anything that has to do with visual arts for example, architecture, industrial design, medical, law etc. These jobs may not be fully automated, but the human supervisor will be relegated to a secondary role.

Visual arts and architecture are both things that seem like they'd "suffer" from induced demand: by making it significantly easier to build a unique home, we'd be lowering the cost of people getting individualized homes, which would disproportionately increase demand. Leading to more profitable work for more architects.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#74

Post by scott00 »

sophacles wrote: post #18
weberc2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is your proposed metric better than the original? Honest question.

Not the parent, but all other things remaining the same, population growth alone will drive the need for more cashiers. Since ATMs did not stop population growth, percentage based metrics help account for that. So the different types of numbers can help drive home different points: * in absolute numbers, ATMs didn't cause any job losses. * in relative numbers, there are less job opportunities in this space. (e.g. the…

I think the second is actually much less worrisome than the first. With absolute job losses, people who lose their jobs need to retrain or accept (probably much) lower pay in different fields. Both of those are hard on people psychologically, and requires very expensive government intervention to mitigate. With the second you just alter the mix of what young people are trained in originally. It will be more expensive to train a young person in programming as opposed to truck driving, but it's not nearly as bad as training a 50 year old trucker in programming, fiscally or psychologically.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#75

Post by Houshalter »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #67

> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40." I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education. Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existenc…

School is already useless. See this essay for instance https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/02/contra-robinson-on-sch...

How many people use say more than 1% of the knowledge they learn in High School? Hell how many people even remember more than 1% of it? There have been studies done on unschooled kids - that get minimal formal education and are allowed to spend their time however they want. And they do only sightly worse than schooled kids.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#76

Post by neaden »

Jtsummers wrote: post #29
DashRattlesnake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> supermarket cashiers Why do you think they're useless? They certainly aren't currently [1]. Someone has to do their work, either paid employees or unpaid volunteers (i.e. customers). [1] at least until that Amazon fantasy-land store becomes a practical reality, if it ever does

Half the cashier's job is automated (tallying is managed by scanning in the items, payment is handled by using the customer facing CC machine; they only handle cash, checks, and manual entry of produce). Bagging is often handled by cashiers, customers, or dedicated baggers. Baggers are cheap, the only skill required is to know not to put eggs beneath a half-gallon of milk (though many seem not to know this anymore).…

The supermarket I go to recently got rid of all of its self checkout lines and replaced them with additional express (15 item or less) lines. I'm not sure their reasoning for it but I don't think cashier automation is a sure thing.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#77

Post by Animats »

dragonwriter wrote: post #13
shas3 wrote: post #6

I'm sure there is a good critique of that Frey and Osborne paper. Epistemologically, it sounds weird to assign 'probabilities of automation.' I don't have the time to read the paper in detail, but here are a few things: 1. Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased. 2. Automation by itself is not sufficient. Will…

> Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased. Did the number of cashier's per customer (or perhaps more significantly, as a share of the population -- not labor force) increase? If you look at even AEIs graph [0] that they use to try to sell idea that ATMs didn't kill cashiers' jobs, it shows cashiers increasing r…

The US Department of Labor has more detailed info in their "Occupational outlook handbook".[1] They project a 2% increase in the number of cashiers from 2014 to 2024, compared to 7% for all occupations.

Bank teller employment is in decline.[2] -8% from 2014 to 2024, says DOL's projection. Although, as DOL says, "Job prospects for tellers should be favorable because many workers leave this occupation."

AEI's last data point is from 2008, which was before most ATMs could cash checks and pay out immediately. Now that ATMs can read and validate checks (including handwritten ones, there's considerable AI behind that), the big Friday check cashing line is at the ATM, not the teller windows.

A friend of mine runs a branch of a major bank. The bank is moving to a branch layout which looks like a car dealership without the cars. There's a receptionist to direct traffic, and offices on both sides with sliding glass doors, just like the ones in car dealerships. That's where they sell loans and other financial products. In the back, barely visible, are two teller windows. There are conveniently placed ATMs both inside and outside the branch. That's what's happening to bank tellers.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/cashiers.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/te...

Re: The rise of the useless class

#78

Post by greenleafjacob »

Houshalter wrote: post #75
unityByFreedom wrote: post #67

> "Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40." I can't help but see this whole "robots are taking over" thing as a Republican position which leads to people not valuing public education. Learning to read and write, do math and science, understand physics and biology, etc, will never be useless. These are core bits of information we have collected over our existenc…

School is already useless. See this essay for instance https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/02/contra-robinson-on-sch... How many people use say more than 1% of the knowledge they learn in High School? Hell how many people even remember more than 1% of it? There have been studies done on unschooled kids - that get minimal formal education and are allowed to spend their time however they want. And they do only sightly w…

Like advertising - 99% of advertising is useless, but identifying which 1% isn't is hard.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#79

Post by ideonexus »

pasquinelli wrote: post #63
ideonexus wrote: post #58

This is the most fascinating quote for me. If corporations and nations are entities capable of owning things, could we give such power to software/algorithms? How would that work? As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the alg…

Algorithms require hardware to run on, so they'll have all their assets drained away from them in the former of rent to the landlord, that is, the person who owns the hardware they run on.

Thinking out-loud in terms of a corporation. The owners are the landlord for the corporation, but that corporation is it's own legal entity. Owners come and go, but that corporate entity remains and insulates the owners from many legal and financial repercussions of the company's actions. It's a similar thing with countries. I'm not personally held responsible for the actions of the United States or the Town in which I dwell, but I am one of the landlords for those entities.

I think the question here is whether there are advantages to making algorithms legal entities similar to our other communal legal entities. It's a radical idea, but so is UBI and some other suggestions for mitigating the obsolescence of many human being as a result of automation.

Re: The rise of the useless class

#80

Post by return0 »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #73
return0 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of cooking as an example of a surprisingly complicated job. OTOH i can think of many supposedly "creative" jobs that are already ripe for disruption. Anything that has to do with visual arts for example, architecture, industrial design, medical, law etc. These jobs may not be fully automated, but the human supervisor will be relegated to a secondary role.

Visual arts and architecture are both things that seem like they'd "suffer" from induced demand: by making it significantly easier to build a unique home, we'd be lowering the cost of people getting individualized homes, which would disproportionately increase demand. Leading to more profitable work for more architects.

> Leading to more profitable work for more architects.

I think it will make their job easier, which means more people will compete, which means less profitable work.

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