"While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic
Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired."
I'm not sure how the rest of it will pan out, but we are right on the cusp of a pretty significant job takeover by robots. Truck drivers.
Consider that we already have vehicles (in prototype) that can outperform a human behind the wheel. Hell, Stanford is sending an Audi TT up Pike's Peak at 100+ mph (http://bit.ly/9akGU1).
And consider that truck drivers are basically meat-based robots anyway inasmuch as they are all practically interchangeable.
Once the first trucking company gets the idea to start replacing drivers, that's going to put them at such an insane competitive advantage that the rest of the industry will have no choice but to follow suit. No downtime, no accidents, far cheaper, no irresponsible behavior.
Once the process is started, the entire delivery driver industry is going to be obsoleted within 12 years.
That will be the first time a massive number of people perk up their eyebrows and start wondering if their job is far behind...
This assumes the Teamsters have no power, which they do. The power of the Longshoremen to prevent substantial automation (compared to other major ports) in the Port of Los Angeles and the resulting productivity deficit vs the Port of Rotterdam for example appears to be realtively durable.
Once the entire logistical chain is fully automated the teamsters will have much less power. After all, if you don't need workers it doesn't matter if they strike.
The only thing you're not including in this equation is votes. Union leaders simply need to convince lawmakers that it's in their best interests to pass favorable legislation limiting the adoption of new technologies. It's certainly been done before.
This is where America's organization as a collection of states is helpful. At least one or two states will be willing to let automation take over once it's developed, and it's effectiveness there can become leverage to spread it to other states.
That seems to assume a (almost) simultaneous switch from manual to automatic. In reality, it would probably be done as a small test case to see how well it works and be expanded slowly. A strike during this process can still be damaging.
In my country buses have a driver and a charger, who collects the fares.
Some companies started replacing the chargers with automatic fare collection equipment. But it turned out they weren't allowed to fire the chargers. So there's still a charger in each bus who will sell you the ticket so you can put it into the machine. Oh, you bought a ticket before boarding? Well, the charger still has a job to do: to ensure you do use the ticket (the driver can't do it because the gate is in the middle section of the bus).
In contrast, I purchased a ticket for and boarded a recently-developed commuter train in my area and not once on my journey did I encounter anyone who worked for the transportation company. Not even on the crowded return trip was there a ticket check.
You might find reading _The Box_ ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691136408/conmanlabo... ) interesting. When shipping containers were first used in 1956, the various longshoreman unions were really unhappy and fought quite hard to keep the status quo.
It gets more exciting when you have companies creating robotic forklifts (http://www.inro.co.nz/automated-forklift/), so the end-to-end manufacturing, loading, shipping and unloading could potentially all be automated.
I wonder if a robo-shipping vessel would be next? With radar, anti-pirating water cannons and no accessible decks, galley, etc it would be a huge boon for shipping. Then again, I don't know how uneventful those journeys are.
Hopefully the govt can step up with some way of re-educating employees obsoleted industries into something that interests those citizens.
Modern merchant vessels are already highly automated, to the extent that crew compensation is a fairly small component of total cargo costs. Trying to reduce the crew further would be chasing diminishing returns.
While it's possible to build a vessel that navigates itself from port to port they will at least need some engineers on board to fix equipment when it breaks. It wouldn't be safe to leave a robot ship drifting powerless in mid-ocean. The crew is also able to do a lot of routine maintenance during transit. Without a crew, the ship would have to spend longer in port just to have enough maintenance time.
Interesting point. Automation will only continue as long as we can save significant amounts of labor by automating. So we can expect to see more automation in the construction of automobiles and lawn mowers, but in all likelihood the fabrication of microchips is about as automatic as it will ever get.
Big cargo ships are already vulnerable to piracy and the handful of crew on board does little more than give the pirates some hostages.
If the ships were fully automated, and remote controlled, you could simply refuse to comply with the pirates and just keep sailing wherever you planned.
I can't even imagine the legal repercussions of giant robotic trucks killing motorists. I would be cheaper to keep hiring drivers than paying tens and hundreds of millions for wrongful death suites.
After enough accidents, many municipalities and states would prohibit such trucks, that would render them useless.
Interestingly, even if the number of fatal accidents caused by robot trucks was less than the number of accidents caused by human trucks, it would be unacceptable to the public.
The number of fatal accidents would have to go close to zero.
I wonder if human nature might help make robot trucks safer on the road, by the magic of risk compensation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation). A robot truck will most certainly be marked distinctively so the human drivers know there's a computer at the wheel. Human drivers will perceive this robot truck as dangerous (at least I would, and I doubt I'm alone in that prejudice) and thus drive a little safer in its vicinity to compensate. Possibly, driving a robot truck down a street would even reduce the human-on-human accident rate.
And the robot truck companies would be insane not to protect themselves. They would be wise to take a page out of the commercial aircraft industry's playbook, and instrument the hell out of each vehicle. Continuous engine telemetry and redundant camera views of the immediate vicinity recorded on a 30-minute loop, frozen after a crash and a core dump of the "driver" appended to the record for crash reconstruction. It'll be a tough sell emotionally, that the robot truck was following the speed limit and stop lights, but we'll get there.
Pie in the sky idea: if politicians had spines they could pass laws that required damages given in cases of robotic accidents to be no higher than damages given in accidents caused by humans, which is an obvious and sensible solution to the problem.
We (politicians and non politicians) are not rational creatures. An airplane bomb scares us more then a .5% increase in road deaths, a shooting more then an infection, etc. I am not immune to this. Getting squashed by a robot truck scares me.
Right, that's why the hope is that politicians will put aside their irrationality and do what is best for the people, even if the people don't want it. It's a pie in the sky idea because it would require politicians (and those who would replace the ones who get voted out due to popular ire) have moral backbone and courage to do unpopular but right things.
I don't want to be uncharitable so let me make sure I'm understanding you. Are you embracing the same rhetorical sequence that others often use to argue that mandatory vaccination is a bad thing? I.e. are you arguing that people's fear of a thing ought to be as significant a consideration as the real benefits it brings to them and others around them?
I think it's all a matter of degrees. If the "right" policy offends people's religious ideas, nationalism, instinctive irrationality's, or whatever else, this might have consequences that outweigh the benefits of this policy. People being irrational can do damage.
An obvious example is civil unrest which is often a good reason not to implement liberal/libertarian policies in many places.
> An obvious example is civil unrest which is often a good reason not to implement liberal/libertarian policies in many places.
It's only a good reason because there are other good reasons to implement those policies too. Civil unrest would not be a good reason to begin beheading petty criminals, no matter how scared people were of being pick-pocketed. I'll give it to you that it is a matter of degrees, but the amount of fear that would be required to outweigh even the smallest iota of real benefit would have to be enormous. If robot trucks saved just one life per year on average, it would be morally unacceptable to obstruct their implementation even if they induced the same amount of fear as all the fears of planes crashing and terrorist attacks.
If Robot trucks saved 1 life per year, they would be killing people every week (assuming they replaced all trucks). Every week you would have reports about faulty software, potential hacks and such. It would be massive scares.
There are lots of places where lives are lost because a certain narrative is something that the public can swallow. You could spend billions of virtually useless aviation security dollars to save many lives. How would the public react to 50 terrorism deaths, twice a decade?
In the US, regulation of robotic long-haul trucks will probably be almost entirely at the federal level (interstate commerce). So I doubt municipalities will have the authority to prohibit them.
Well, who will the create robots that maintain the robots?
AIs? Cyborgs?
Now, robots can create all that stuff and maintain it all. Who will it sell it to?
Even if robots can create all the stuff and then sell it, who is responsible for the entrepreneural function?
AIs? Cyborgs?
If robots take over every single jobs in the world? What will really happen?
Moreover, who will own these robots? Maybe robots become cheap enough that everyone own bots?
If we become machines, than what are robots?
Robots and machinery aren't free lunch! The automation thread is just getting started, and we have not figured out how to automate entrepreneurship yet! And even if we do, we might already become machines!
Note: parent edited while i was replying. This is in response to the first 2 lines. (who will maintain the robots)
Well, first it can probably be assumed that there will be a few standard robot types. These will be cheaper to replace than to repair. One of the standard robots will be a replacer robot which can swap out all the standard robot types (including other replacer robots).
I presume that the few standard type robots can themselves be assembled by robots. Then it is simply a matter of having two (or more) robotic factories with the necessary stuff to create a robotic factory. Should one factory fail, a robotic robot will become the number 1 manufacturing priority.
Now since the robotic robot factories would become ideal targets for sabatuers and terrorists and the like, a better step would be for each robot to know how to create a robotic robot facotory built in. Then even if both robotic robot factories fail, they can team up with the nearest robots to create a new robotic robot factory.
So, number of jobs is the only variable that matters? Compare the lifestyles of the 7900 old-style weavers to those of the textile factory workers. Who lived longer on average? Who ate better? Who had time for family? Strictly in terms of money: what was the wage of a spinner and what was the wage of a textile worker?
I'm not saying that machines are bad, I'm saying this argument leaves out an awful lot of info -- unless you take on faith that more jobs == better.
The "argument" is about jobs. You may want to talk about something else, but that is not what the article is about. It is an answer to the claim that automation created unemployment, not that automation is better.
The article pretty obviously is written under the assumption that more jobs is better. I am challenging that assumption. I am not suggesting that the article does not show how more jobs are created.
The fact remains unchanged that a bunch of people got the crap end of the automation stick. It is not unreasonable to think that maybe there was a better way to got about the automation that was both good for the people being displaced, and created a bunch of jobs? My previous questions were sort of aimed here, but when I wrote them I had not yet coherently formed this most recent question.
This is like when someone calls in to call in radio show about how the new way of qualifying for the rugby world cup asking "should we really be encouraging our kids to play such a violent game?" OK. Good Question. We can talk about that next week. Today we're talking about qualifying matches. Most people who listen to this show like rugby, so we probably will keep relying on the assumption that rugby is fun and we should keep doing it.
Yes. There is an assumption that employment is better then unemployment, indirectly. The point being challenged (automation causes unemployment) assumes that unemployment is bad and the counterargument goes on assuming that. It doesn't (as you suggest) assume that employment is the only possibly important thing in the world.
If you would like to make the case that employment is not good or that automation is bad for some reason not related to employment, go ahead. It is perfectly reasonable to write that article with the assumptions that it made.
If you read carefully, the more jobs situation was 40 years later. This means that at least for some time, unemployment was higher as a result of the automation. The thing to remember is that you can't mothball workers, you cant say "hey dont eat or live untill the job creation curve from this new tech catches back up, you'll be in demand again". So while the net effect of automation is more jobs, it still doesn't make the immediate (within a workers lifetime) impact necessarily better.
Another thing the article mentions is a 4400% increase in the number of jobs. This is not population growth, (it is only 3 generations assuming child labor), so where did those people come from? Were they more skilled workers earning good wages replaced by automation? Were they unskilled workers whose previous jobs had been automated away (ditch diggers and the like)?
In one case you have a net loss in liquidity in the hands of people, this is the net equivelant of lost jobs. In the other case you have a potential gain in liquidity. Once again, not making a case for or agains the automation, just discussing if the employment is equivelant.
To use your analogy its not like me asking if we should continue with the rugby at all. It's more like me saying "Hey guys, I know that the mechanism is different, but can we also look at the fact that 100 more teams in the cup might dilute the quality of play?"
I think it may be more interesting in many ways to consider not only the amount of work that machines might create or destroy but the nature of that work. John Ruskin had some very interesting things to say about this in the early industrial era:
http://forsclavigera.blogspot.com/2008/02/ruskin-work-and-na...
There is an even more common fallacy that is even harder, probably impossible to kill: trade create unemployment.
I find the argument very convincing that trade, from the perspective of one partner is exactly like technology. Found a way to produce grapes in a building cheaply; Found a way produce grapes in a shoe factory.
Higher average productivity is great, but the problem America has at the moment is an ever-widening gap in income, and very little political will to do anything about it. An important passage in the article:
William Felkin, in his History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery Manufactures (1867), tells us (though the statement seems implausible) that the larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years.
If this is true it is a big deal. Suppose you invent a device that will double economic output while putting half the population out of work. There's no question the device needs to be put to use, but something needs to be done about all these displaced people as well. Much of the surplus in productivity borne of your invention will need to be used to help those people switch to other work, allow them to retire early, etc. In other words you will be taxed heavily, something which is very hard to do these days in the States. So the American worker seems especially vulnerable to displacement by automation, and you get this scapegoating of machinery. If you don't like it, next time you hear some jerk on the radio bleating about high taxes and socialism, think about where that money might be going, and vote accordingly.
Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired."
-- Milton Friedman