How Technology Is Destroying Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#21

Post by wffurr » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 12:20 PM UTC

That technology destroys more jobs than it creates can only be news to economists. Any one of us has put far more than one other person out of work by automating their data entry or analysis jobs.

This essay on four possible futures along the axes of scarcity and equality is highly relevant.

http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/

Does a post-scarcity economy, the sort implied by democratizing production via 3D printers and cheap energy, necessarily imply a more equal society or can the rentier class find a way to extract profits via patents and intellectual property?

Conversely, if we end up constrained by natural resources — energy, feedstocks, labor, etc. — is it even possible to move to a more equal society?

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#22

Post by 6d0debc071 » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 12:20 PM UTC

raspasov wrote: post #17

Kudzu_Bob wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, people of average and below-average intelligence are screwed.

Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education which is becoming more and more widely accessible due to cheap technology and Internet access. Viewing people as "below average" or "above average" is a very pre-deterministic way of evaluating any person's potential :).

> Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education.

You are aware you've just posited free will? I think that's such a significant claim that it needs some sort of support. Because things like family education level and income seem highly determining for lifetime outcomes - in a way that would seem to support the idea that free will doesn't exist.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#23

Post by thenerdfiles » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 12:36 PM UTC

thenerdfiles wrote: post #18

«In our own time, the development of technology and the growth of cities has brought man's alienation from nature to a breaking point. Western man finds himself confined to a largely synthetic urban enviroment, far removed physically from the land, his relationship to the natural world mediated by machines. Not only does he lack familiarity with how most of his goods are produced, but his foods bear only the faintest…

Follow-up:

«Unfortunately, the singularity may not be what you’re hoping for. By default the singularity (intelligence explosion) will go very badly for humans, because what humans want is a very, very specific set of things in the vast space of possible motivations, and it’s very hard to translate what we want into sufficiently precise math, so by default superhuman AIs will end up optimizing the world around us for something other than what we want, and using up all our resources to do so.»

— http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y9lm0/i_am_luke_...

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#24

Post by thenerdfiles » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 12:40 PM UTC

6d0debc071 wrote: post #22

raspasov wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education which is becoming more and more widely accessible due to cheap technology and Internet access. Viewing people as "below average" or "above average" is a very pre-deterministic way of evaluating any person's potential :).

> Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education. You are aware you've just posited free will? I think that's such a significant claim that it needs some sort of support. Because things like family education level and income seem highly determining for lifetime outcomes - in a way that would seem to support the idea that free will doesn't exist.

You said "determining" not "determined," but then you conclude with some absolute ontological statement about something-such not existing.

A: "Are you going to school tomorrow?" B: "Well, statisticians tell me crime rates are incredibly high; so I probably won't make it to school. Why go, it might as well not exist?"

The point of A is lost — get an education. It's not all teet-sucking techno-commerce; those statistics say nothing about how peoples came to build those systems in the first place of which those [EDIT:] quantificational terms like "income level" describe.

Moreover, a revolution does not require that anyone die off, but that a system, or status quo, ends.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#25

Post by peterjancelis » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 12:45 PM UTC

Cheap interest rates are destroying jobs.

Artificially low interest rates == artificially high amount to spend on machine replacing labor == labor earnings go down as percentage of the economy.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#26

Post by raspasov » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 12:45 PM UTC

6d0debc071 wrote: post #22

raspasov wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education which is becoming more and more widely accessible due to cheap technology and Internet access. Viewing people as "below average" or "above average" is a very pre-deterministic way of evaluating any person's potential :).

> Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education. You are aware you've just posited free will? I think that's such a significant claim that it needs some sort of support. Because things like family education level and income seem highly determining for lifetime outcomes - in a way that would seem to support the idea that free will doesn't exist.

Yes, I believe we've entered the era where almost anyone can learn anything, and self-educate himself. Things like educating oneself on the internet that were not possible only 5-15 years ago are becoming possible and much more easily accessible by many. It's possible that for many years majority people are not going to wake up that realization, like I said in my first comment, which is sad.

Any study you're going to look at that measures "lifetime outcome" (if you can measure such thing, is Nikola Tesla a bad outcome because he didn't have much money at the time he died?) will have to look at a span of 50 years at least. So a study done right now would have to start for people born around 1963 at best - a time very, very different from the world nowadays.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#27

Post by sjwright » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 1:15 PM UTC

Technology has destroyed jobs for hundreds of years. It means we as a species are continually releasing human labour resources to tackle newer, more exciting challenges.

The difficulty is transitioning these labour resources from tasks now mechanized, to new endeavours that society is interested in solving.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#28

Post by 6d0debc071 » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 1:23 PM UTC

thenerdfiles wrote: post #24

6d0debc071 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education. You are aware you've just posited free will? I think that's such a significant claim that it needs some sort of support. Because things like family education level and income seem highly determining for lifetime outcomes - in a way that would seem to support the idea that free will doesn't exist.

You said "determining" not "determined," but then you conclude with some absolute ontological statement about something-such not existing. A: "Are you going to school tomorrow?" B: "Well, statisticians tell me crime rates are incredibly high; so I probably won't make it to school. Why go, it might as well not exist?" The point of A is lost — get an education. It's not all teet-sucking techno-commerce; those statistic…

I don't think your sentences are analogous to mine.

The more data we get, the better we've been able to predict what people are going to do. Uncertainty reduces if you assume that people's choices are determined. But free will - what does that get you; what does that even look like as a prediction of the distribution of behaviour? It's an empty premise, like saying phlogestine.

The idea that everyone, many of whom have serious problems with motivation and the practical concerns of doing so, should or can just choose to educate their way into the workforce pays no attention to the difficulties faced by in doing so. It's a denial of the reality in which many people live and how they interact with that.

I do some charity work in my free time, many of people there can't even work out how to attach their CV to their job applications for god's sake. Many of them have serious mental problems. Many of them feel entitled to benefits. Many of them just have no motivation for any sort of learning - never really having seen benefits from it. They're not going to sit down and do umpteen years worth of self-education. Free will, choice, these are not serious answers to the sorts of problems that we face as a society.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#29

Post by _random_ » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 1:29 PM UTC

Well, who is the nerd now?

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#30

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Sep 07, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

While you cannot view technology as some kind of force of nature, immune to ethics, blaming the misery of joblessness on technology is beside the point.

When is the last time the minimum wage was raised? The last time the work week shortened? Those laws are in place because of technology eliminating human labor. Those legal changes were the solution to a problem technology created. But they have not been updated while technology is galloping away. We blithely crush low-skill, entry level jobs because they are easy to crush.

Technologists have a responsibility to mitigate the impact of technology. But the answer isn't to restrain technology. The answer is to deliver benefits to society as a whole, and that comes from restructuring our economy to benefit workers.