Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

For example, let's say that the task is to add up a list of 10,000 numbers. It might take a human a while to accomplish this accurately. A computer won't take much time at all. The computer is accomplishing the same work as the human in a much shorter amount of time. The computer could handle a vast number of such tasks per day for a lower price than any human, with better accuracy.

Similarly, imagine hauling cargo across the country. A human could put the packages on their back and walk, or alternatively a human and freight train team could haul them by rail. The human and freight train team accomplishes vastly more work than the human alone, and is able to haul much larger and heavier packages at a much faster speed.

After the industrial revolution, the enclosure movement was used to strip peasants of their land. After being dispossessed, they were then desperate enough to accept the paltry wages and disgusting working conditions offered by the factory owners.

Today, a Chinese factory worker may be saving money because they need to care for their infirm grandmother living in a cancer village because the state provides little to no social welfare support for her.

Do you think it's germane to argue on a moral basis that because China provides no welfare for that grandmother that American factory workers ought to take a pay cut?

Personally, I think trade policy needs to be intimately connected to human rights and environmental and labor conditions. No improvement in those sectors, no deal. That isn't the world we live in though. We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.

AI/ML which can mine through sports footage to create highlight reels and funny clip collections, etc will create tons of consumer goods (videos) which can all be monetized on Youtube. Just one example.

How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite a lot more people to watch movies and tv than before.

Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.

It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now.

I also want to point out that, yes, in a globally competitive world wages become globally competitive. If a Chinese worker with an infirm grandmother is surviving on a lower wage than an American was making without an infirm grandmother, then that American needs to find better work, do better quality work, or take a pay cut. We would never force consumers to buy products produced only by ethical means or only by human-rights approved conditions (if that were the case, no more chocolate!). Why would we do that to multinational companies?

There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals and all the goods skyrocketed in price leading to another Great Depression.

> We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.

You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities. I'm not saying everyone should be enslaved. But if consumers have the right to purchase such ill-made goods, then companies have the right to offshore their labor forces to such places too.

Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads.

Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing.

Then there's the entire middle management strata of the the economy. Mostly a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder.

The economy is already large enough to produce plenty for everybody, guarantee food, housing and healthcare for all, and with shorter working hours at that.

Unfortunately we're trapped in this bizarre economic system that works us to the bone in pointless jobs we hate, and can't even guarantee us the basics.