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The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

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Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#221

Post by Clubber »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #204
Clubber wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine they have much better social safety nets than in the US. In the US, if you are unable to work, for whatever reason, you are pretty much on your own.

Sure, but the point in the comment I replied to was that we need to keep people busy (not only with their material needs covered) to avoid violence and revolts. The case of Spain or Portugal seems to tell us that as long as people have basic needs covered, they don't necessarily fight or revolt much.

Yes, you can keep plenty busy with things that don't pay. Art, traveling, gardening, exercising, etc. In fact, most of those things get pushed aside when people work.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#222

Post by dragonwriter »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #211
prostoalex wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So basically yes, the government will pay for an army of child carers, an army of infrastructure fixers, an army of trash picker uppers, etc. It just won't pay very much and most of what it pays will be in-kind benefits rather than money This did not seem to work for Soviet Union (and its reluctant allies), and market realities still exposed themselves - if you wanted to hire a government plumber, repairman, electr…

The Soviet Union had only this system, nothing else. I'm proposing is using this kind of a system to provide government services (e.g. filling in potholes) in return for money we are already spending . In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector. I'm proposing no restrictions on the private sector - in fact, one explicit goal of this system is to make government dependence less pleasant (you need to go out into…

> In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector.

AFAICT, this was strictly true (if at all) only between the first Five Year Plan and 1936; the private sector (that is, non-government directed business) was restricted in both what markets it could participate, and the forms of business (in most markets where private industry was allowed, the only business form allowed was the individual independent worker/owner, to use the language of capitalist economy) but it was not nonexistent.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#223

Post by dragonwriter »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #219
prostoalex wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this dual system what happens to the government-run pothole-filling entity (and its employees) when it's outbid by a private pothole-filling contractor on most/all jobs?

Then the private pothole filling entity gets the contract, and the government directs it's dependents to do something else. But it'll actually be pretty hard for the private sector to compete on any task requiring unskilled labor. The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work. Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instea…

> Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instead of giving people money NOT to work, we instead give them money to work.

No, you are actually proposing giving them money, whether or not there is work, and then trying to scrounge up some (perhaps meaningless) work so that the money you give them cannot be used for personal development, small entrepreneurship, etc.

> I'm not proposing communism or slave labor.

Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts) labor through economic coercion rather than chattel slavery, but I'm not sure that the difference is meaningful, especially if there really is a problem of a growing-over-time number of people unemployable at any given time in the private market due to changes which render their labor superfluous given the available alternatives.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#224

Post by dragonwriter »

oli5679 wrote: post #62
cousin_it wrote: post #6

Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…

You've got the 1st order effects completely right, but there would be several second-order effects that would undermine this result. (1) There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output. (2) The reduction in marginal costs would increase supply of the good and reduce its price. (3) The increased profits earned by the firm/robot inventor would increase demand or saving/consum…

> There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output.

Er, no.

A fall in non-skilled wages does not lead to an increase in demand for non-skilled labor output. It leads to an increase in supply of non-skilled labor output. This, under usual conditions, leads to some combination of decreased market clearing price and increased market clearing quantity of those goods.

> In 1850, 60%+ of the American labour force were farmers and over the next 100 years their jobs were automated out of existence by range of more efficient 'robots'. This was no-doubt harmful for many specific farm labourers, but didn't 'screw over the economy'.

Since the 1850s, quite a lot of social support mechanisms have been adopted within the US economy, largely to deal with problems encountered during the process of industrialization, including the displacement of traditional labor (including farm labor).

The idea that further disruptions of that kind might need improved corrective measures when the cracks in the compensatory mechanisms are already visible is hardly outrageous.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#225

Post by dragonwriter »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #207
PeterisP wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, there really isn't a market for a huge number of maids when it costs $1000/month, and you can't really go below that because, as you say, $10/hour.. about the minimum wage in many places. The middle class in USA definitelly can't afford to pay $12k/year (plus taxes!) for such a service. The most highly paid white collar professions would generally scoff at such an expense. At best, the top 1% could affo…

The middle class in the USA is already paying for such a service! When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work. All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something .

> When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work.

Okay, there's a sense in which that's true, but...

> All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something.

The problem with that (aside from any other problems with the whole "basic job" idea) is that the only sense in which it the preceding claim is true is if you count medical and contribution-qualified programs for the aged and disabled (which are the bulk of payments "to people who don't work".)

I mean, this characterization is ludicrous unless your plan is to drag people out of nursing homes to serve in your Basic Job Army.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#226

Post by johngalt »

CaptSpify wrote: post #217
johngalt wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video is a well articulated argument, but there are two large gaps in reasoning that are common with this line of thought. Grey ignores the idea that technology also allows for normal people to do jobs that used to require highly skilled specialists. A big part of this is so called 'brain' labor. A banker before computers had to have amortization tables manually calculated. Now the personal banker who does your H…

> Grey ignores the idea that technology also allows for normal people to do jobs that used to require highly skilled specialists. Computers are much better at highly specialized jobs than people are. And the amount of things they are not good at is slimming down all the time. > If Watson is doing diagnosis, that means that more people with less training can be effective 'doctors'. And it'll eventually improve to the…

You're conflating technology that is available today with challenges which occur only after we have AGI. When those are different problems with different time horizons.

Post AGI. Obviously robots do everything. Post AGI it is the technology singularity as we have recursively improving superintelligences. Unemployment in this scenario is a trivial issue. Strong friendly AI would solve so many problems that unemployment would be one of those historical footnotes. Concerning ourselves with 'what happens when computers are better than humans at everything?' is akin to asking 'what should we do after the rapture?'

Prior to AGI, human + computer is the norm for most tasks. Similar to my banker example. You'll have specialized computers augmenting human productivity. In each case driving costs down and in most cases usage up. Specialized computers will make it easier for humans to do jobs they couldn't do before. Even if truck driving becomes fully automated there will still be humans in the loop somewhere. It will just mean a more efficient ratio of man hours per ton shipped. Which is not a fundamentally different issue than dealing with any other efficiency increase.

> your logic is skipping over the fact that computers don't have hard limits like humans do. If a computer can't do something, just give it a handful of engineers, and some time, and it'll eventually be able to do that. Once a computer gets better at a task than humans, there's no reason to ever go back to humans. It's a one way street.

I don't deny that. Merely that we've been headed down this one way street for a while and the houses keep getting nicer. I keep hearing that Efficiency Avenue will take us towards human suffering, but we've been heading this direction for centuries and never arrived there. In fact everything about what we have seen so far says we should travel as fast as we can down that one way street.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#227

Post by dragonwriter »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #100
cousin_it wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the existence of jobs you could quickly retrain to is an eternal law of nature :-(

No, but at the moment there are many such jobs. Maid, cook, child care, a significant amount of construction labor, etc. I blogged about this a while back. Until robots do all the jobs that are actually done in India (e.g. robot cooks, robot maids, robot cigarette walas), there still exist jobs people can do. Americans just refuse to do them, since it's easier to not work. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robo…

> Maid, cook, child care

...

> Americans just refuse to do them

Lots of Americans work as cooks, work cleaning homes, or work in child care. Wages in all three of those areas are quite low, there's not demand for a lot more that would provide livable wage in any of them.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#228

Post by oli5679 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #224
oli5679 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got the 1st order effects completely right, but there would be several second-order effects that would undermine this result. (1) There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output. (2) The reduction in marginal costs would increase supply of the good and reduce its price. (3) The increased profits earned by the firm/robot inventor would increase demand or saving/consum…

> There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output. Er, no. A fall in non-skilled wages does not lead to an increase in demand for non-skilled labor output. It leads to an increase in supply of non-skilled labor output. This, under usual conditions, leads to some combination of decreased market clearing price and increased market clearing quantity of those goods. > In 1850,…

1) 'Quantity demanded' would have been more precise (and more verbose) than 'demand' but you tell exactly the story I was attempting to.

2) I was critiquing the claim that 'automation reduces efficiency', not the claim that there could be distributional issues. You are attacking a straw-man.

"This was no-doubt harmful for many specific farm labourers"

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#229

Post by dragonwriter »

prostoalex wrote: post #220
yummyfajitas wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the private pothole filling entity gets the contract, and the government directs it's dependents to do something else. But it'll actually be pretty hard for the private sector to compete on any task requiring unskilled labor. The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work. Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instea…

> The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work. The motivation for the overseers is clear. The worker bees have two choices - work hard (and get paid) versus do nothing (and get paid). Why would the workers go for the former versus the latter?

Presumably, when ordered to work, the benefits would be cut off if the work was refused or performed unacceptably.

I mean, otherwise this whole mandatory-work-for-benefits thing doesn't make any sense (not to say that its a good idea even then.)

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#230

Post by dragonwriter »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #205
TimJRobinson wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most aren't, but some are, and as there is no way to separate the good from the bad you have to take this into account. I'm just pointing out the main flaw in this plan and the reason it (as far as I know) has never been implemented. You can argue against a strawman all you like but it's not going to solve any problems.

Why is there no way to separate the good from the bad? Just have a strict "one strike and you're out" policy. It's certainly a fallacy to say that a plan is impossible because no one has done it before; everything has a first time. It's irrelevant in this case, however. FDR implemented it, it was called the Civilian Conservation Corp and it was awesome - we got a national park system out of the deal. India does it to…

> FDR implemented it, it was called the Civilian Conservation Corp and it was awesome

Its an awesome solution to a particular kind of transitory unemployment (and, at the scale it had at its height, perfectly sensible when there is a large, national, temporary economic dislocation) where you expect that the kind of work that people were doing before will be in demand again.

Its less good as a way of dealing with long-term structural changes in the economy -- either in the proportion of people employable at living wages in the marketplace or the jobs demanded. Particularly the latter, since locking people into public make-work jobs with mostly or entirely in-kind, survival-necessity payment provides little opportunity for adjustment to labor market changes.

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