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Software Is Eating the Job Market

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Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#81

Post by mason240 »

chadgeidel wrote: post #77
mason240 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't socialism at all. The main tenants of socialism are ending profit and private property. UBI embraces the same kind of capitalism we have now with private property and profit. In order to say that UBI is socialist, you also have to be calling Social Security socialism, and you have to think that President Obama is a socialist. I think you would find a lot more support among conservatives than you think (it…

"In order to say that UBI is socialist, you also have to be calling Social Security socialism, and you have to think that President Obama is a socialist." And that's exactly what the Tea Party types are saying.

So you agree with them?

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#82

Post by juliangregorian »

merpnderp wrote: post #78
juliangregorian wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism always tends toward monopoly, there's only a difference in the minds of idealistic libertarians.

Only in the corporate welfare system we have today (see Chevrolet bailout). Without corporate welfare in the forms of subsidies, bailouts, and regulations, companies like Telsa would be destroying the major auto manufactures. What old major companies would still be around without un-capitlistic like interventions from the government?

No, it was true for East India, it was true for Standard Oil, and it's still true today. Much of regulation was intended for the protection of consumers, not to cement incumbents, and the subversion of the same is evidence of capitalism's predatory nature.

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#83

Post by oldmanjay »

juliangregorian wrote: post #31
wyager wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The net production capacity of humanity (per capita and absolute) is constantly increasing. Why would you ever run out of consumers? Just because fields occasionally become irrelevant doesn't mean that those workers and their descendents will never find work ever again.

Right, this is the problem with capitalism. It's predicated on the assumption of returns increasing to infinity, which is clearly impossible.

I'm not sure where you get that idea. There may well be individual capitalists who believe that, and certainly in the heat of speculation some individuals act as if that is their belief, but the system itself has no such requirement.

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

russell wrote: post #79
ctdonath wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you'll have increasing encroachment on motivation of the productive. When Ronald Reagan was a top-billed Hollywood actor, he faced a ~90% tax bracket. Rather than work hard only to see most of his earnings confiscated, he'd make just a few movies and then enjoy those profits instead of spending time on diminishing returns. Same for plenty of us motivated ones: if 80% are living off the 20%, that will require t…

I understand this issue of maintaining motivation under conditions of artificial full employment was a problem under the Soviet system, but I'm not sure it is necessarily a problem in a post-scarcity economy. For one thing employment can be increased by reducing the work week. After all we went from 60 hour work weeks to 40 hour, even less in Europe where there are longer vacations than in the US. Education over the…

> I understand this issue of maintaining motivation under conditions of artificial full employment was a problem under the Soviet system, but I'm not sure it is necessarily a problem in a post-scarcity economy.

Post-scarcity economy is a contradiction in terms, and if post-scarcity conditions existed, one wouldn't have any need to worry about economy -- which is, after all, nothing but the system by which scarce resources are allocated.

But we're not really discussing post-scarcity conditions, we're talking about managing conditions where the rewards from production are increasingly concentrated in the holders of capital and the returns to labor are mostly extremely low with a (proportionally) very small set of high-value labor positions available.

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#85

Post by dragonwriter »

mason240 wrote: post #63
s73v3r wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the political landscape today, we need a different solution. That's basically socialism (something I don't have a problem with), and I'm sure you've seen how well things with even the hint of socialism have gone over in the US. Most Tea Partiers would be completely happy to have things turn out Hunger Games style, as they're assuming that they'd be on top, rather than having to send their child in to fight.

This isn't socialism at all. The main tenants of socialism are ending profit and private property. UBI embraces the same kind of capitalism we have now with private property and profit. In order to say that UBI is socialist, you also have to be calling Social Security socialism, and you have to think that President Obama is a socialist. I think you would find a lot more support among conservatives than you think (it…

UBI is absolutely a kind of socialism; it may embrace the same kind of 'capitalism' we have now, only in that what we have now and sometimes call 'capitalism' is a system which blends many elements of socialism with some structures of capitalism in an attempt to address the kind of problems with capitalism that were the center of the critique by the socialists who named "capitalism" as a thing while at the same time maintaining the desirable features of capitalism, e.g., reward mechanism and incentives. UBI builds on that to, to be sure, but it certainly reflects an idea of common ownership of some commons on which rents are collected (and, if its going to work at all in an increasingly capital-intensive and less-labor-dependent economy, those "commons" are going to include a share of superficially privately-held capital -- i.e., the means of production -- so its pretty hard not to see the direct connection with socialism.)

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#86

Post by kfk »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #75
kfk wrote: post #58

So, when we came up with agriculture some millenia ago, all those jobless people, those hunters/explorers/etc., did not stay jobless, did they? What about when we came up with machines in the 19th century? All those people in agriculture would still be jobless, but they are not, are they? Point is, every technological innovation will be absorbed in the long term. It's been historically this way for millennia, at leas…

A past trend being unbroken is a good heuristic for it to continue, but it is not proof that it will do so. The coming issue is that our software is getting better at replacing jobs faster than new jobs can be created. Not only is manual labor jobs being replaced, but so are knowledge jobs and creative jobs.

> The coming issue is that our software is getting better at replacing jobs faster than new jobs can be created

That is a pretty big assumption right there. There is no absolute amount of jobs being created, right? I mean, wouldn't you pay $1 per hour to have your shirts ironed? Then is it a problem of jobs count or jobs pay? It's pay, isn't it? If it's pay, then you are asking the wrong question. The question would be: is software making jobs cheaper? That is a very tough question. Implications are not that clear: from one end you cut jobs, from the other you are improving the productivity of your economy. With more productivity you get... you guessed it: more wealth. Then what's the problem? It's a problem of wealth distribution isn't it? It's wealth concentration in few segments of the population. That is a completely different problem then what you just said. Wealth distribution has nothing to do with value created and it's a topic in its own way.

Bottom line: it's not about how many jobs you have, but how spread is the wealth your economy is creating and how spread it's going to be in the future.

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#87

Post by anigbrowl »

kfk wrote: post #58

So, when we came up with agriculture some millenia ago, all those jobless people, those hunters/explorers/etc., did not stay jobless, did they? What about when we came up with machines in the 19th century? All those people in agriculture would still be jobless, but they are not, are they? Point is, every technological innovation will be absorbed in the long term. It's been historically this way for millennia, at leas…

Every innovation is absorbed in the long term, but in the short term the results often include recessions, revolutions, wars and so on, which have a non-negligible cost. As Keynes said 'in the long run we are all dead,' so we need to be cognizant of how these changes play out on the scale of human lifespans as well as national ones.

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#88

Post by random28345 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #68
random28345 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When your firm can't hire anyone with experience, and there's no entry-level jobs, it will discover the same solution to that problem that has been discovered any number of times in any number of other situations already Yes, hire a temporary worker with an H-1B visa or outsource it outright.

Guess what? There are other countries with people in them that can program too. Everyone has to compete with that fact. Don't be a hypocrite that dismisses people complaining about Mexicans, software, and robots yet gets upset that people from other countries are playing on the same field. No one is entitled to be the only person that gets to do a job that many other people can do.

> There are other countries with people in them that can program too.

I didn't say anything that disagrees with this statement, I simply said that for the last decade the way to increase profits has been to bring in migrant workers from overseas, and lay off skilled domestic workers, and there's no reason wh the approach won't continue to be the same in the face of a hypothetical domestic skills shortage.

In fact, the idea that there are "other countries with people [...] that can program" is a strong disincentive to have an apprenticship/training program, and reinforces that the primary solution to expanding hiring is going to continue to be H-1B visas and not education.

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#89

Post by fillskills »

Last year I was working on trying to fix this - the constantly changing skill gap, specially in Software. My idea was that users could choose what they want to do, what they already know. And algorithmically show them what exactly they need to do. Stopped working on it for personal reaons. Would love feedback - FillSkills.com. While still lots to do on the backend, the UI is represntative of what I wanted to do.

Re: Software Is Eating the Job Market

#90

Post by klipt »

kfk wrote: post #58

So, when we came up with agriculture some millenia ago, all those jobless people, those hunters/explorers/etc., did not stay jobless, did they? What about when we came up with machines in the 19th century? All those people in agriculture would still be jobless, but they are not, are they? Point is, every technological innovation will be absorbed in the long term. It's been historically this way for millennia, at leas…

> those hunters/explorers/etc., did not stay jobless

A lot of them were killed by agricultural invaders, since you can feed a much larger army with agriculture.

> All those people in agriculture would still be jobless

Agricultural countries like India got invaded by industrial countries like Britain.

Even now, increasingly autonomous drones are killing people in the middle east.

It's often not good to be on the sharp, pointy end of new technology.

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