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Are jobs obsolete?

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Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#81

Post by fauigerzigerk »

chailatte wrote: post #36

My theory from before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769 - In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet. - 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via se…

I believe there will be a lot more entertainers if you include all the people who create movies, music, games, etc.

I also think there will be an army of people caring for others - the elderly, children, the sick.

I do not believe that the 6% of people you think will have all the money will just buy more stuff with their money. They will buy other people's time instead and that's why your 80% group will be more like 25% in my view.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#82

Post by tsotha »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #18
efalcao wrote: post #5

It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs." Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business. After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspape…

I think part of what Rushkoff is saying is that the transition from classified ads to Craigslist should be a win for society without caveats. People placing ads are better off -- they don't have to pay to place the ads, and their ads are more widely seen. People responding to ads are also better off -- they don't have to buy newspapers, and have much better search and scan capabilities, et cetera. But thousands of pe…

>Those that lost their jobs are not now contributing less to society -- their jobs would be glorified make-work in a post-Craigslist society. It should now be easier for society to feed, clothe, house & entertain these people than it was before, yet they are not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained as well as they were before. It's also hard to argue that they do not deserve to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.

>It is a failure of capitalism.

I don't see how that can be considered a failure of capitalism. On the contrary, this is capitalism functioning the way it's supposed to function. These people aren't "not getting fed, clothed, housed and entertained" on a long-term basis. They need to find jobs doing something the rest of us are willing to pay for.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#83

Post by dreamdu5t »

silverbax88 wrote: post #70
dreamdu5t wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"power structure of self-absorbed property owners" implies that people who don't own property aren't self-absorbed, or that the power structure of property owners is responsible for greed, unemployment, and undereducation. Otherwise, why mention a power structure of property owners?

Mentioning the existence of a power structure of property owners does not automatically include all property owners.

Okay... then what does the power structure of private property have to do with it?

Unemployment is not necessitated by private property. Removing the power structure of property owners will not eliminate unemployment or cause people to become educated. This is what Jello implies, and it's naively incorrect.

Come on, Jello openly professes these politics/ideas, I am not reading anything into the quote that isn't there. He mentions power structure of property owners for a reason.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#84

Post by ojbyrne »

jbooth wrote: post #65
ojbyrne wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not considering the second order effects. Multiple competitors appear to compete with craigslist (either head to head or picking off the most attractive niches). Market grows, profits fall. Are we better off? Just look at the service. Before we had tiny little text ads in the back pages of newspapers, now we have pictures, directions, the ability to search and sort, etc... clearly the service is better. And I…

There's no way that there's a comparable level of jobs. You know how many people the newspaper industry used to employ nationwide? Craigslist had substantially less than 100 last I heard (maybe they've grown a bit), pushing a way larger volume of classifieds, without any expensive correspondents or any of that news crap. As the original commentator stated, bringing their jobs back would be silly make-work now that th…

Kijiji, AirBnB, Cars.com, etc. etc. See http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-cr...

I think you didn't grasp the phrase "second order effects."

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#85

Post by mayutana »

serge2k wrote: post #41
mayutana wrote: post #22

A similar model is being followed in Europe where the unemployed, disabled, recent mothers and the poorer people are provided some sort of basic support by the state. The higher earning people have extra cash to live more comfortably.

Unfortunately you have to support not only people who are just going through some tough times, but those who just want to leech off society. Plus those people who go out and have kids, then waste the money they are given to feed them on crap so their child is either starving or lives off a terrible diet. It's really not an easy problem to solve. Ideally everyone should be guaranteed that they get enough food and a pl…

True, there are leaches too. But the goal to ensure that everyone has a basic level of living standard is in the direction of what the OP talks about. Note that this is different from the systems implemented in USSR where everyone was provided the same, regardless of their skills or efforts.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#86

Post by jcromartie »

cwp wrote: post #77

There is a nugget of useful discussion in there, in that corporations aren't as necessary as they used to be. Better communication technology lowers coordination costs and we don't need big organization and bureaucracy to get big things done anymore. But the whole "technology is destroying jobs" meme is just horseshit. What's destroying jobs in the US is lack of demand. Other counties (no, not all of them, but many)…

You're right: Technology doesn't kill jobs.

It kills demand.

Who wants to send paper mail, or a landline phone, or to take out traditional classified ads? The alternatives are too appealing and the demand for the old versions is never coming back.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#87

Post by mayutana »

silverbax88 wrote: post #43
chailatte wrote: post #36

My theory from before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769 - In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet. - 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via se…

I don't mean to sound condescending (although I'm sure I will), but your theory about the future has already happened, and collapsed, in other countries: USSR and China being two prominent recent examples.

USSR was different where everyone was eligible or provided with the same whereas the poster talks about providing some basic livelihood to all and allowing those who can earn more to continue to earn more and live better.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#88

Post by chailatte »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #81
chailatte wrote: post #36

My theory from before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906769 - In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare, supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities, cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet. - 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via se…

I believe there will be a lot more entertainers if you include all the people who create movies, music, games, etc. I also think there will be an army of people caring for others - the elderly, children, the sick. I do not believe that the 6% of people you think will have all the money will just buy more stuff with their money. They will buy other people's time instead and that's why your 80% group will be more like…

Sure there's alot of entertainers, but most of them will struggle without making decent money (just like today).

There's a reason I said 20 years. In 20 years, most of baby boomers wealth will have disappeared. And so the eldercare/health industry will collapse then.

And remember there will also be alot more robots/vending machine/teleremoting help desk doing services, reducing human needs.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#89

Post by philwelch »

randomdata wrote: post #69
philwelch wrote: post #3

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace. And, more to the point, a toll collector isn't necessarily bright enough to be a toll robot technician. Sometimes prog…

> We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them. Separation of concerns is our current solution to that problem. In software development, for example, good developers are hard to find, so we split the job up to add a designer role into the mix. Still finding it hard to find good people, we're now seeing the UX role come in. By giving each person les…

If you push separation of concerns far enough, you start finding roles that can be played by computers and robots rather than humans.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#90

Post by pnathan »

serge2k wrote: post #41
mayutana wrote: post #22

A similar model is being followed in Europe where the unemployed, disabled, recent mothers and the poorer people are provided some sort of basic support by the state. The higher earning people have extra cash to live more comfortably.

Unfortunately you have to support not only people who are just going through some tough times, but those who just want to leech off society. Plus those people who go out and have kids, then waste the money they are given to feed them on crap so their child is either starving or lives off a terrible diet. It's really not an easy problem to solve. Ideally everyone should be guaranteed that they get enough food and a pl…

Agreed.

Good government must manage the leech/liar problem. Such people should not be enabled.

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