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How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

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Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#41

Post by executor14 »

fiesycal wrote: post #35
rondon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you raise the US Minimum wage to $20 an hour you will immediately see people move their companies to Mexico,China,etc.. So that will only make the problem worse. Instead of making $10 an hour those employees will be making $0.

Honest question which companies? Which companies that currently pay workers minimum wage are able to move overseas? Mcdonalds, Walmart etc cannot move their service jobs overseas.

Won't the result just be a further investment in technology that leads from two people making $10 an hour to 1 person making $20.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#42

Post by jiggy2011 »

fiesycal wrote: post #35
rondon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you raise the US Minimum wage to $20 an hour you will immediately see people move their companies to Mexico,China,etc.. So that will only make the problem worse. Instead of making $10 an hour those employees will be making $0.

Honest question which companies? Which companies that currently pay workers minimum wage are able to move overseas? Mcdonalds, Walmart etc cannot move their service jobs overseas.

It might incentivise those companies to find ways of doing business with less human labour. For example computer checkout /ordering systems or more emphasis on doing business online.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#43

Post by mcguire »

noloqy wrote: post #4

What's the problem exactly? Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years? Productivity is the ratio of units of output per unit of input, where you can abstract input as being either capital or labor. Indeed, productivity continues to grow as a consequence of technological advances. When mankind started using oxes to plough fields, landworkers' productivity rose significantly. As we develop more tools to aid us in daily…

"Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years?"

13. I.e., since 2000.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#44

Post by jiggy2011 »

unono wrote: post #37
jiggy2011 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Services like Mechanical Turk/TaskRabbit/eLance etc emphasize workers as commodities leading to a race to the bottom in prices and the most profit for the platform vendor. Looking at the average earnings on these sorts of platforms it would seem like a challenge to eek out even a meagre existence in a first world country.

The reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to middle class level. This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion- dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year from a billion users.…

Not sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour. This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that will get the work done.

Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a cut when they are capable of finding customers on their own. This leads to a sort of lemon market where the buyers who are willing to pay the highest rates for the best workers will tend to avoid these places altogether.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#45

Post by johnchristopher »

Zigurd wrote: post #30

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 whil…

> The answer is to deliver benefits to society as a whole, and that comes from restructuring our economy to benefit workers.

Isn't it more likely to be a political problem ? I am thinking capitalism and neo-liberal tenets are tainting technologies and those philosophy hold the responsibility for the current situation. The job/resource/supply/demand pool, despite what pro free market supports believe, isn't limitless.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#46

Post by unono »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #44
unono wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to middle class level. This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion- dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year from a billion users.…

Not sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour. This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that will get the work done. Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a cut when they ar…

You're totally correct when it comes to skilled work, they get snatched up when they've proven their worth. However, this cloud labor is for unskilled work.

So yes, they are commodities, but if they are a lot of them, and a lot of work to go around, wages rise. We saw this with the industrial revolution, especially assembly lines. Mid 20th century you could live pretty well as an unskilled assembly line worker, but then the work dried up.

Most modern work, knowledge work, hasn't been turned into assembly line yet. Many would argue that's because it can't be, but I disagree with that, much of enterprise software is about turning it into that (workflows,processes). It just requires more of the same. There are actually very few cloud labor startups (mturk, crowdflower, mobilworks) with at most a 100 programmers, one reason being that it doesn't have the network effects moat that VC's look for. Robotics is another casualty of that. How do you defend your cloud labor,robotics company from competition? That's why it will have to be built from the ground up by bootstrappers.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#47

Post by [deleted] »

anonymfus wrote: post #38
rondon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you raise the US Minimum wage to $20 an hour you will immediately see people move their companies to Mexico,China,etc.. So that will only make the problem worse. Instead of making $10 an hour those employees will be making $0.

Why not regulate work week trough WTO, UN or other international organisation?

[deleted]

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#48

Post by jiggy2011 »

unono wrote: post #46
jiggy2011 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour. This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that will get the work done. Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a cut when they ar…

You're totally correct when it comes to skilled work, they get snatched up when they've proven their worth. However, this cloud labor is for unskilled work. So yes, they are commodities, but if they are a lot of them, and a lot of work to go around, wages rise. We saw this with the industrial revolution, especially assembly lines. Mid 20th century you could live pretty well as an unskilled assembly line worker, but t…

These platforms make it easier to find labour and thus drives more competition between labour providers but they don't necessarily increase the demand for it, at least at higher pay rates.

It also makes the competition for knowledge work go international which might increase pay in developing countries but lower it in first world countries.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#49

Post by melling »

fiesycal wrote: post #35
rondon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you raise the US Minimum wage to $20 an hour you will immediately see people move their companies to Mexico,China,etc.. So that will only make the problem worse. Instead of making $10 an hour those employees will be making $0.

Honest question which companies? Which companies that currently pay workers minimum wage are able to move overseas? Mcdonalds, Walmart etc cannot move their service jobs overseas.

They'll automate even more. It might spur a push to improve commercial robotics.

Re: How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

#50

Post by loup-vaillant »

Zigurd wrote: post #30

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 whil…

There are other levers, such as Basic Income. A suggestion I heard would be to abolish minimum wage altogether, and introduce unconditional basic income.

The hope is that basic income would make part time work sustainable, and give more leverage to workers. Possibly making minimum wage unnecessary.

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