>specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval. Average height of Englishman decreased before started to increase (based on military records). Workers started to organize, skulls were cracked. People were shot in the streets. Armies were ordered to kill workers. There were bloody civil wars and revolutions.
Industrial revolution was not possible without massive social change that created, land reforms, working class, middle class and increased private consumption and accumulation of capital. It was at times bloody, but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained. Not so in Soviet Union or China.
Anti-Union violence, Union violence (union busting) communist violence, anticommunist violence was pretty intense at time even when the society as whole worked.
Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties. We can still list numerous conflicts with 10-100 deaths: The Molly Maguire trials (20 workers executed), Battle of Virden, 1898 Colorado labor war,Italian Hall disaster, Ludlow massacre, Thibodaux Massacre, Pullman Strike, West Virginia Coal Wars, Rock Springs massacre, 1905 Chicago Teamsters' strike, Steel Strike of 1919, The Herrin Massacre, 1922, Battle of Blair Mountain, Hanapēpē massacre, Harlan County War, Memorial Day massacre of 1937.
Future of Automation will create wealth and prosperity beyond all our dreams, but it requires massive political struggle that settles issues like privacy, rent seeking, ownership of personal information.
Violence in the street may be positive sign that automation is finally changing our society.
If we're blaming industrialisation for everything from labour disputes involving a few shootings to full-blown communism in largely pre-industrial countries, it's probably worth noting that revolutions and war were the rule rather than the exception for the previous few millenia as well. What was novel - albeit so novel it took generations to filter through - was universal education, the welfare state and the lifting of the majority of the population above subsistence incomes.
What was novel was company towns, cartels (Trusts) turning numerous industries into monopolies, etc. A lot of it really does curl one's toes (I'm just reading a Forbes collection of history articles.)
Yes peasant revolts happened before this. There was an old cruel aristocracy, and then a new, industrial aristocracy which was inexperienced, fumbling and cruel. Industrialization wasn't the first harsh transition in human history, but who argued it was?
That sentence fragment you cite leaves out that this is the view of "economists," not the author's. This claim is addressed and rebutted further down the page.
> Many economists say there is no need to worry. They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
I think you'd have to count the American Civil War as a conflict caused at least in part by the industrial revolution, which would dramatically increase the toll it took in North America.
The cotton gin was textbook automation. In a strange twist of fate, it actually increased the demand for labor. Because it was very labor intensive to remove the seeds from a cotton boll, cotton wasn't a very profitable industry. After the gin (short for engine, what developers call automation engines), demand for labor and land skyrocketed.
The cotton gin is an example of an automation removing the need for labor (deseeding cotton) and subsequently creating a greater need for labor elsewhere (planting and harvesting). Of course, in this example, the increased labor demand ultimately resulted in 720K deaths.
As I've mentioned before, there's a book from 1926, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", which outlines the three basic cases of what happens when new technology is introduced. Their examples are the Linotype, the glass-bottle blowing machine, and the stone planer.
The Linotype was a win for printing workers. Typesetting had been bottlenecking the process, and with fast typesetting, book and newspaper prices came down, and the volume of printed material increased enormously. That's the good case.
The glass-bottle blowing machine is the not-so-good case. Bottle-blowing used to take a team of five people trained to work together and manipulate molten glass, blowpipe, and mold with tight coordination. This was a skilled trade and paid well, but bottles were expensive. Automatic bottle-making machines could make bottles rapidly with minimal labor. Bottle sales went up, and the bottle business grew, but the skilled trade was dead. Most of the workers were shoveling sand in one end or taking bottles out the other. This didn't take much skill. Operating the machines was not too hard. You probably needed a maintenance guy who really understood them, but only one for many machines. So most of the skilled jobs went away, replaced by low-paid entry level jobs.
The worst case was the stone planer. Back when brick was the key building material, stone lintels were used over doors and windows to provide structural support for the bricks above. Stone was chipped by hand by big guys with big hammers and big chisels to make flat, rectangular stone beams. The stone planer was a powered machine for squaring off a block of stone. Like a wood planer, but heavier-duty. No more need for big guys with chisels. Huge increase in productivity. But the market didn't grow, because stone lintels were a minor building component and cheaper stone lintels didn't mean more demand for them. So most of the workers lost their jobs.
Those three outcomes still apply to many cases of computerization.
Great examples. Really demonstrates the complexities we face.
This may be the best argument for basic income. Why don't we just admit that we just haven't a clue how things are going to pan out? Things could be fine, or things could get very nasty. Looked at this way basic income is not analogous to social welfare/security – when we admit that we have no clue how the future is going to unfold then basic income looks more like social insurance.
This puts me in mind of a thought I had this morning. Why are narratives compelling? Because they explain events. In the past before formal methods allowed us to develop accurate models humans used a narratives even where they are inappropriate. Now, because models have been so successful the pendulum has swung the other way and we tend to over-rely on model based explanations when really we have no clue.
What am I saying? Just suppose that the "elephant curve" has been brought about by automation or the 4th industrial wave as the article calls it. We have many many people predicting outcomes based on economic and social models that may fail to apply in spectacular fashion. Maybe what would be better would be to institute basic income to ride out digital automation while models are tested and refined. But also let us collect stories from now and from the recent past to use as cautionary tales whose main purpose is emphasize the point "we don't really have a clue and anybody who tells you they do is talking out of their ass".
Yeah, I struggle with this squaring this disruption with a generally libertarian economic stance. If we truly are at the edge of a disruption that will make the vast portion of workers under or unemployed, what does that mean in terms of social stability and survival for those people?
I'm not seeing good responses from libertarians regarding the inbalance in how law is practiced; would appreciate pointers to write ups of more effective libertarian-style remedies. That is, corporations with concentrations of power are treated by libertarians as possessing equal standing with individuals in a court of law. In practice, that is absolutely not how it works out. Yet, many a libertarian response to various problem spaces is "the courts will work it out!", in a deus ex machina style conclusion. Spend any appreciable time (>= 10 years) running a business, and you'll probably observe the same: I've yet to meet a business owner who subscribes to the "equal under law" libertarian ideal, everyone I've spoken with agrees that larger concentrations of wealth and power commensurately enjoy greater access and privileges in the court systems around the world that are unobtanium for smaller entities. I've heard the libertarian response of "we're just not capitalist enough" applied to this problem domain; look to US-style private arbitration to see how that's turning out. I've never been a fan of the "no true Scotsman" approach, anyways. Any libertarian-oriented remedies that realistically acknowledge how humans practice acquiring and deploying power of various forms would be appreciated.
From what I gather, there are really two facets of libertarianism. The social libertarianism, meaning let people do what they want, stop banning everything, drug war is futile, etc. Then there is the economic libertarianism, which means keep the government out of most, if not all business dealings. Deregulate, etc.
I highly suspect people are much more interested in the first, but not really the second. Interests who stand to benefit from the second are selling them as a package deal and we will end up only getting the second. In other words, the arrest machine will keep running, but businesses will be free to fleece customers, government and employees with impunity.
Surprising though, regulation is intended to save capitalism, not hurt it, at least in the long term. If capitalism runs down a path where it no longer benefits the vast majority of citizens in any given country, there will be hell to pay resulting in the end of capitalism. That would be a shame too, properly regulated capitalism is a really great system.
Maybe if the laws were closer to what libertarians would like, this equality in front of it would be achievable. The basic libertarian philosophy regarding law says the only enforcing laws should concern the non aggression principle.
Libertarianism doesn't provide a good methodology for prioritizing the well-being of disinenfranchized person's, so If your ethics tell you that preserving property relations are less important than elevating the condition of all humans, then perhaps it is time to evaluate alternative economic stances that prioritize property less than people.
One such alternative would seem to be Proudhon's anarchism (mutualism) or even Marx's (or his predecessor's) Communism, though I know this is generally an unpopular response, I see no reason why it has no merit.
Economic libertarianism is the XXI century version of Leibnitz optimism of the XVIII century, which was so eloquently critiqued by Voltaire in Candide -- with Capitalism replacing God. They just believe that capitalism is the best of all possible systems and if we just blindly follow its rules everything will be fine and well, it doesn't matter how many people suffer in the meantime.
English-speaking countries? Because as a native English speaker, I have no problem reading their words but I have no idea what kind of numbers they're trying to express.
Yeah I know they're roman numerals but I can't read roman numerals without significant effort. It's bad form to include large roman numerals in English text. The majority of English speakers aren't going to know roman numerals beyond 10.
In the 1800s and early 1900s at least some people could emigrate to countries like the US where there was still a lot of open space. Even that's not an option this time.
We are not running low on "open space" at all. The habitable area of the planet is vast.
Many of the emigrants of the 1800s ended up settling "new" land in the US. But there's vast territories around the world that are extremely inexpensive. Since the 1800s we have grown more dependent on the services provided by the state in urban areas.
In the 1800s you could go somewhere, kick out the natives and declare yourself the owner of the land. I don't think that's possible anymore. At least not in most habitable zones. Where in particular do you recommend people should go?
They left much of the areas they slaughtered the natives for, the midwest is still incredibly empty. Five states with eleven people per square mile or less, including Alaska. Plenty of space.
The "empty" midwest is all owned, though. $4000/acre, maybe? That's not much if you are trying to buy land to build a house. It's a lot if you're trying to acquire 1000 acres for a farm, though.
Alaska is largely government owned. It's empty, but that doesn't mean that you can take a chunk of land there.
You can, but you'll be dirt poor. Back when "dirt poor" was normal, and luxuries like "bathing every day" or "carpet" were uncommon, being dirt poor seemed acceptable. Now most people won't accept that as a lifestyle.
The problem isn't the abundance or lack of open space, it's the fact that the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive.
This. There's a reason that communist revolutions were fueled by a desire for bread, peace, and land. In the start of the 20th century, you could make a decent living if you owned nothing but the land you lived on.
I wonder what happens if we get robots that can provide a complete living off some plot of land. Like agriculture, energy and whatever you need. So in theory you could live autonomously then.
Somehow I think the owning class will come up with ways to make this illegal or impossible.
Why would robots make a difference? Currently, you can't really live off of a plot of land alone, but you'll be living quite well if you also own a bunch of high tech machinery to farm it efficiently. For a well-off Ferrari-owning farmer, the Ferrari is likely not among the most expensive vehicles he owns, the tractors/combines/whatever cost the big bucks.
That's what the poster above meant by "the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive", and owning these robots would be the massive amount of capital; you'd be able to sustain yourself because (and if) you'd have a lot of very expensive robots, not because you just had some land; and you'd also be able to sustain yourself by just investing the value of these robots.
I think that it was not so much about open space, as an opportunity to establish an economic independence. The likes of which the equivalents only exist in different forms today - much akin to dreams of startups today.
The idea that there was open space in the Americas before the Europeans came is a myth. It neglects the inconvenient fact that the native Americans were already here.
The indigenous population of the Americas was absolutely destroyed by Old World diseases. This happened mostly by accident (although sometimes done intentionally) but was probably near inevitable once first contact was made. (In many places it out-paced the actual extent of direct European contact as indigenous people traveled.)
So there WAS vast expanses available by that time, even without intentional genocide (which also happened).
Disease killed a lot of the native population, maybe even decimated, but it did not leave the USA a vast open space. Otherwise the US Army would not have had almost continuous warfare from the conclusion of the Revolution War to the surrender of Geronimo (minus the Civil War) to displace the natives to make room for American settlers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
A large percentage of the land battles of the War of 1812 were fought between the US and natives because the US wanted the land of the natives to become open space so the natives allied themselves with Britain.
Lewis and Clark would not have survived or even made it to the coast if they had not had help from most of the tribes they met along the way. Of course we displaced all of the natives they met eventually.
So why settlers spent so many bullets to kill people who were already dying by nobody else's fault? And if there was so much open space in America, why Europeans happened to locate exactly in the "very few" places where natives lived? Strange, indeed.
In the specific year you state was four years before Lewis and Clark started their expedition. They would not have survived if they did not have help from most of the natives they met along the way, one of the main objectives was to document all the natives that lived there. That would have been kind of weird goal if it was all open space.
re point one
the __lowest__ plausible percentage of North America and South Americans that died of disease before ever hearing a rumor of it source is 90% and has a fair chance of being higher, the disease front traveled as quickly as the natives, refuges from one dying village to the next, or people coming to investigate why no body has visited from the next community over in a while.
The deliberate atrocities later were just a mop up action in the larger picture.
I've read estimates of smallpox outbreak at 20-50% mortality across the continent. Some areas in New England are estimated to have a 96% mortality rate. Pretty crazy.
The libertarian would say that if the general public gets access to advanced robotics then there will be enormous prosperity. For example, imagine if you could buy a robot that would survey your backyard, order equipment from amazon, start planting food, set up irrigation, harvest and deliver it to a neighbors automatically? Free locally grown food for everyone. Now, isn't that awesome? You could also rent a robot that would find water, dig wells, trench, put in pipes, etc. The possibilities are endless to take PRODUCTION of goods out of the hands of specialized highly capitalized organizations and into the hands of anybody who can rent a robot.
The problem is is that a robot this advanced could also be used for very sophisticated bad purposes, so you're going to have lots of regulation and big corporations will only be able to use these robots and you'll have to buy things they produce with whatever meager wages they let you have.
Just take out a loan. The food cost savings and excess production will pay for the loan and they can repo the robot if you don't pay. The robot will even be able to tell you if it's likely to be cash flow positive.
Only people working would qualify for a loan. Those people would have more prosperity until the robots cratered all wages and prices, being free labor and flooding the market with excess.
When the prices crash a large number of people with robots will be unable to pay back the loan. Their robots will be repossessed. They will now be out of a job and with no robot.
The poor would get left over food from the kindness of people with robots? They'll certainly never work again.
The robot will properly buy futures contracts so that the borrower will be insulated from any food price fluctuations. If the numbers don't add up the lender will not make the loan. There will not be any "overproduction". The robots will instead recommend another line of business where the robots production will be profitable given the price of market futures for those products.
I have an American friend who lives in Argentina who works online. The cost of living is such that he can work two months and pay his living expenses for two years. Those horribly low prices in Argentina are totally killing him. Not!
So what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?
This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving.
BTW, The novella "Manna" by Marshall Brain is kind of a good take on the future with robots and everything, though I don't really like his "happy" future.
BTW, thanks for giving me a hard time on this. I am getting to the point where this is going to be a bit of a manifesto and you're helping me flesh things out.
I'll be interested to see if any manifesto can plot a path through societies looming issues. I don't see a scenario where we can maintain our current style of capitalism without things breaking down in one way or another.
You're friend in Argentina:
* has the ability to get a job from home, which means it's probably a tech/outsourcing job in a first world country. That doesn't take care of 95% of the population. That doesn't fix the issues.
* In the robot scenario where robots are smart enough to understand markets/futures and can decide a completely different line of work, and then do that work, those remote jobs are gone. Your friend is out of work. He doesn't get a robot.
* the company that hires him has to compete for resources in their country of origin. Their local pay requirements determine what they think a "good deal" on labor is. That country would have robots as well and their wages would crater. Again your friend's cush life would disappear, unless he could buy a robot.
>what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?
Now you are getting to the root of the issue.
We produce enough food in the US that nobody should go hungry, yet we have swaths of kids that don't know where their next meal is coming from.
We have enough abandoned houses that nobody should be homeless, but people still live on the streets.
In capitalism, a private person/entity produces and someone else has to PAY to use what's produced. The issue isn't that there won't be enough to go around. The issue is that our current system will allow lots of people to starve and do without even when there is excess.
You used the term libertarian. That might be why you're getting all the push back. Maybe I'm misinformed on the topic. Libertarians believe an unregulated market and human morality will make everything better. Those two things combined gave us the triangle trade, raw goods (America) --> manufactured goods (Europe) --> slaves (Africe). We also got child labor, poisonous food being sold, no education, life threatening work conditions, etc.
>This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving
Being against this strategy is the antithesis of capitalism. If I give away food, prices drop. If I reduce the supply then prices will go up.
During the great depression, prices dropped so low that all farmers were going to go bankrupt. Farmers themselves were dumping crops and rioting to keep crops off the market to try and increase prices. Farmers were marching on courts because they were demanding that foreclosures stop.
If you let farmers flood the market with goods (lowering prices), while allowing them to refuse to pay their debts, then what kind of economy do you have? It's not capitalism.
My concern is that the coming wave of automation will recreate the great depression x10. The population at large doesn't see it coming, and maybe I'm a chicken little. 30% of the US population think poor people are just lazy, and that if they just worked harder they'd be better off.
When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.
>When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.
This is what I keep harping on with folks. I think automation will hit and hit hard and our current economic/political structures are not ready for it or won't be able to adapt fast enough (hence your depressionx10 or just a massive inequality gap).
We already have 'more productive' economies but we have stagnant wage growth, increasing rental/housing costs due to people leaving for cities since there are little/no economic prospects in rural areas now, and, as you said, logistical problems in fulfilling basic necessities. Not to mention mental models that say that these 'unemployed' folks are bad and should just retrain/go to bootcamp/move elsewhere.
Consumption-wise, we can buy whatever we want. Shitty food is cheap, electronics, etc, all cheap. But some of the base foundations in Maslow's hierarchy don't come very cheap anymore and it's harder and harder to get to the higher reaches.
* My friend is not a rockstar programmer. He's about average, and in San Francisco he was living in Bayview and getting his house and his car regularly broken into and barely scraping by. Now he lives like he makes 5x the money he did in SF and his taxes are vastly lower since he's making less money, but living better. This is one of the largest mysteries of modern capitalism. Why are the prices for things so vastly different in different countries?
* If the robots can run the futures market and do general purpose programming then we probably won't even need money because we will have perfected central planning. Instead the robots will be playing a game called "The Humans" which is like when we play "The Sims" with the goal of trying to make the Humans happy. This will go on at a superhuman level of intellect and we won't even be able to analyze what the heck is going on, much like we can't really know why Alpha Go makes the moves it makes. We just won't turn it off because we can't live without it. This is the good or bad future depending on the ultimate fitness function, which in the good future is make everybody happy and not where the fitness future is based on deep ecology (DE) [1] which would prefer a 95% population reduction.
* My friend might not be a web developer, but he could probably get a job working on designing some guy's Burning Man float who owned a robot for enough to live well since it would require an absolutely trivial amount of effort to live since there would be so much supply.
* As far as Libertarianism goes, your formulation seems to be that that means no rules. No not really. I don't think ANY libertarian that is respected by the libertarian community would think slavery or poisoning people should be legal so you really have got a strawman there. Besides if we had no rules at all the wealthy Deep Ecology people could get together and decide they wanted to exterminate everybody they don't need to maintain things with killer robots who unlike in the movies have perfect aim and tactical strategy.
* The foreclosures during the great depression were due to collapse of bank reserves due to fractional reserve banking. You had short panics in the 19th century before the fed and fractional reserve banking, but not depression like scenarios of rapid credit contraction as the money multiplier work in reverse. This is unfortunately a very very deep rabbit hole side issue that requires a 30 page essay to get through. In China, which is probably more capitalist than the U.S, they have a different system. They have tons of companies that have bad debts and the government prints money out of thin air to selectively bail them out without austerity forced on the taxpayer, which is why they haven't had a credit crunch that has predicted every year for the last 30 years.
* The happy path of the future AI automation is normal people get access to these robots and use them to produce unlimited prosperity. The bloody path is only the elite get access and they decide to wipe out everyone else with killer robots because they find them to be irritating useless eaters.
But I don't need a robot to order from Amazon or survey the back yard. In fact I insist on a robot that doesn't order from Amazon. I just need one to do the digging and stooping and weed pulling.
I just had to make the example so ridiculously automated that a 400lb opioid addicted alcoholic high school dropout illiterate person on the bottom end of every bell-curve with a criminal record and bad credit that can barely operate Netflix using a voice interface and saying "I wanna see dat funny show dat given me da gigglez" will be able to use and benefit from this technology so the basic income crowd would be satisfied that no one would be left out.
> but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained.
Empires fell during this time in western europe. And we had a civil war in the US.
> Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties.
You forgot the mass extermination of natives in the US due primarily to industrialization. And the civil war which was bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined.
The nations first to industrialize benefited immensely at the expense of others. But it was extremely bloody in the US as well.
By the time the industrial revolution started the Native population had already been devastated by disease. The Native Americans whose land we took were post-apocalyptic survivors--their civilizations were a shadow of what they were before the old world diseases wiped them out.
>And the civil war which was bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined.
Only because the causalities from both sides count as American casualties, and because we developed better medical treatment and sanitation technology.
Far more civil war soldiers died of disease than combat, which was mitigated in later wars through advanced technology. The number of US combat deaths was higher in WWII.
> By the time the industrial revolution started the Native population had already been devastated by disease. The Native Americans whose land we took were post-apocalyptic survivors--their civilizations were a shadow of what they were before the old world diseases wiped them out.
This is an oft-repeated genocide denial. Yes, disease killed many natives but that's not what committed genocide against the natives and stole their land. This is the same genocidal denial peddled by some who want to excuse nazis by claiming the jews died of disease in the holocaust.
> Only because the causalities from both sides count as American casualties, and because we developed better medical treatment and sanitation technology.
What's your point? Dead is dead. Should they not be counted?
> Far more civil war soldiers died of disease than combat
This is the case in most wars. Not just the civil war. Most of the deaths in ww2 were due to disease/starvation/etc rather than combat. Should we not count those?
>This is an oft-repeated genocide denial. Yes, disease killed many natives but that's not what committed genocide against the natives and stole their land.
The current consensus is that disease was the primary cause of depopulation. Perhaps you should read some of the current work in the field.
That doesn't change the fact that European colonists conquered and subjugated the remaining Native population.
>This is the same genocidal denial peddled by some who want to excuse nazis by claiming the jews died of disease in the holocaust.
Nonsense. You're going against the scholarly consensus here--just like holocaust deniers.
>This is the case in most wars. Not just the civil war. Most of the deaths in ww2 were due to disease/starvation/etc rather than combat. Should we not count those?
You held up the Civil War as an exemplar of terrible wars, saying that it was "bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined". The implication is that it was somehow worse than other wars.
The point is that this is a useless comparison to make and taken out of context you can draw conclusions that don't fit the facts. Previous wars were less bloody because they involved fewer combatants. Later wars were less bloody because we developed new sanitation techniques. And ww2 was much worse in terms of civilian casualties. You can't really draw conclusions about the time period or the social upheaval caused by the industrial revolution based on civil war casualty numbers.
>The current consensus is that disease was the primary cause of depopulation. Perhaps you should read some of the current work in the field.
As I said, that's just genocidal denier's distracting tactic. Also, the consensus is that most victims of the holocaust died of disease/starvation. That doesn't change the fact that the genocide took place. You keep harping on it as if the disease caused the genocide. It didn't. It was european colonization. If europeans didn't come to america and steal native lands, americas would be full of natives - disease or not.
> That doesn't change the fact that European colonists conquered and subjugated the remaining Native population.
And the genocide. Keep denying it all you want, it doesn't change reality.
> Nonsense. You're going against the scholarly consensus here--just like holocaust deniers.
The only one denying genocide is you.
> You held up the Civil War as an exemplar of terrible wars
No. I said it was the worse was america experienced. I didn't say it was an "exemplar of terrible wars".
> saying that it was "bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined".
Because it's true.
> The implication is that it was somehow worse than other wars.
Yes. It was the worst war america fought in. It was the bloodiest. It caused the most damage. It resulted in the most casualties in absolute terms and as a percentage of the US population. If you can find a war that was worse for america, please let me know.
> Previous wars were less bloody because they involved fewer combatants.
No kidding.
> You can't really draw conclusions about the time period or the social upheaval caused by the industrial revolution based on civil war casualty numbers.
Sure you can. Especially in terms of the civil war and its place in american political and military history.
Listen, you are a genocide denier. And now you are arguing against the civil war facts. I'm finished here. You are free to believe what you want.
>You keep harping on it as if the disease caused the genocide. It didn't. It was european colonization.
European colonization brought disease, but disease spread west faster than settlers, or even explorers.
Disease is the cause of the Native American population decline. Without disease the settlers wouldn't have been able to push the remaining Native peoples off of their lands. In the vast majority of cases disease was a byproduct--the settlers didn't intend for hundreds of thousands of people thousands of miles from them to die.
There were many cases where Europeans intentionally killed Native Americans, in some cases intentionally spreading disease.
You seem to have a very difficult time with nuance. Yes European colonizers caused millions of deaths, but the vast majority were caused indirectly without the knowledge of the colonizers. Yes the Civil War caused the highest death toll in US history, but only because both sides were considered American (despite the fact that they weren't American during the war).
>Listen, you are a genocide denier.
Please try to be a little more civil. This is hacker news not reddit.
>And now you are arguing against the civil war facts. I'm finished here.
I never argued against any facts you presented. My argument is that these facts are useless without context.
> I'm finished here.
I doubt it. I'm fairly certain you're going to reply to this.
Can you elaborate further on how the extermination of the natives was driven by industrialization. Having lived and traveled all over the west it is predominately, agrarian, large tracts given over for cattle. I believe their extermination had less to do with industrialization and more to do with taking the land.
I'm not pushing for any particular interpretation here, but that cattle process could be viewed as early industrialized animal production made possible by the railroad. Graze in open areas, drive a bunch a cattle to centralized markets for transport/slaughter.
> I believe their extermination had less to do with industrialization and more to do with taking the land.
Industrialization is what prompted and allwed ships to bring millions of europeans to the US. It's what allowed railroads to ship millions to the midwest and the west. And of course the desire for oil/resources and farmland/etc. Industrialization is what allowed our armies to wipe out and clear the natives west of the mississippi.
>Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval.
interesting that it also correlated with emergence of national identities in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe). There is some parallel here to the nationalistic anti-globalization movements starting to rise today.
What I find interesting is that the second paragraph starts with:
>They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
Which is then followed by this in the 4th paragraph:
>The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million.
A good fictionalization of the events surrounding technological change undermining the existing social order, at least in the late 19th century, is Dostoyevsky's "The Devils". In that book they have the old landed gentry being slowly undermined by technology and new ideas from the west while these younger wild eyed engineers and intellectual radicals are growing up ominously in the next generation.
I would suggest reading the article beyond the second paragraph.
To avoid the HN snark police (oops), here is a relevant passage:
> They are definitely right about the long period of painful adjustment! The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million. The stabilizing influence of the modern social welfare state emerged only after World War II, nearly 200 years on from the 18th-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
Yeah, I also misunderstood this at first. The article begins by _rebutting_ the claim that automation did not cause changes in the employment market that were disruptive and destabilizing.
The thesis seems to be that we should consult historians, not just economists, on this subject.
Modern economy theory is laughable when looked from a historical perspective. All modern economic theories look at society as in stable equilibrium, since they believe that prices tend to equilibrium by nature. Of course you just need to look at history to verify that such equilibrium is nothing more than momentary, the big economic changes really happening as the result of unexpected disruption, like world wars, "unpredictable" banking collapses, etc.
Yeah but you can't ask a historian why this is happening and thus you can't ask them what to do about it moving forward. A technologist on the other hand is able to advice on why it's happening and help outline potential solutions.
But it's details in general I agree that Economists are the least interesting people to ask.
It's amazing how this keeps coming up and people keep try to make these arguments that there isn't really much to worry about in the long run, without looking at this from the right perspective.
18th and 19th century didn't replace humans it replaced either animals or mechanisms (water-mills) or laborious human physical processes.
The replacement we are looking at today is about replacing not just the solutions of the 18th and 19th century but about replacing human laborious intellectual processes.
In the 18th and 19th century you could still point to the human mind and say well at least they can't do that.
But this is now an argument that is becoming less and less true.
What a lot of people who try to claim automation isn't doing anything to jobs forget that most jobs doesn't actually require the whole human being they only require parts of what a human can do. A job is a function in a process even some of those who seem to require the whole human (like experts)
The real way to look at this is too look at what types of jobs requires general human intelligence and which ones require specialized human knowledge or intelligence and what we find is that the cleaning lady is more likely to keep her job for a while while the radiologis function in the process of detection can be compressed into much fewer (and almost none in the long run) people.
And compression is IMO the right way to think about the job market and why it's going to be less and less an area that humans are going to have any dealing with.
In other words automation is about replacing higher and higher levels of abstractions. I don't know of any level beyond human intellect and that is why you can't make comparison with 18th or 19th century progress.
The last people to listen to IMO are the economist as they treat technology as an externality when it's really at the core the job market discussion.
Sure we might end up in some post scarcity society but getting there needs serious attention as it affects how we tax, where we tax, who we tax and to what extent.
Currently politicians listen to economist, they need to listen to technologist way more.
Long before the human intellect is replaced, technology will make the individual human intellect far more productive, which will itself reduce demand for employment in certain niches.
The canonical example I recall is junior legal discovery lawyers who used to pore over paper documents. Such routine tasks are automated and a smaller number of more senior lawyers who do the work of integration and interpretation.
The importance of human intelligence to a functioning economy is overrated.
Humans are social animals; we are each interested in ourselves, and interested in each other. It was true before we developed intelligence and it remains true today. We want to be healthy, socially connected, and entertained; we can never get enough of those. And they can't be automated--a robot can't be healthy for you, or feel emotions for you.
There is no reason to doubt that an economy that is 30% health care, 30% social communications, 30% entertainment, and 10% everything else, can work. Or even an economy that is 99% entertainment, and 1% everything else. Comparing today to even just 200 years ago, we're already well on our way.
"[...] a robot can't be healthy for you, or feel emotions for you."
You're right of course, but you're not addressing an actual argument. No one is saying that.
What people are talking about are AI's replacing doctor's and other health care professionals, replacing Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry, etc.
We as consumers could still be consuming all of these things, but that says nothing about who is producing it.
You can't replace Hollywood with AI because the whole point of entertainment is that it is about humans. You have to have humans making entertainment or it is not entertaining.
I'll give you an example: people still watch bicycle racing. We all know a motorcycle is more advanced technology that could easily beat any human on a bike. So what did we do? We invented rules out of thin air that exclude motorcycles, just so that we can keep watching humans agonizingly grind their way up a mountain on a bike. Because we find that entertaining.
There's motorcycle racing too of course but again--who's on the back of the motorcycle?
A long-held concern is that we'll get rid of all the old jobs, but no new jobs will be created. My point is that even in an economy in which all physical needs are provided for free, there will still be plenty of reasons to create new jobs.
You are mixing two things together. Entertainment is not a job its largely based on its ability to entertain and fewer and fewer make money in the industry.Already today large parts of hollywood has been and is being replaced. The bicycle sport is there because humans like to compete but it has nothing to do with a job, people will do it for free.
All they need to do is develop ex medical solution that keeps you healthy and last I looked no one made money feeling or be able to detect your emotions.
Yes, this. As machines get more capable, the economic role of humans diminish. This is analagous to the fate of horses after the introduction of the internal combustion engine.
Most everyone on this site has the education and skills to stay ahead of the AI revolution for some time. But many other people already have fallen behind. If the only things you know how to do can be done by machines at less cost than a living wage, then what hope do you have to compete?
> As machines get more capable, the economic role of humans diminish.
Empirical data shows the opposite. Machines have been getting more capable for at least 100 years, and job creation has soared. Even if you just look at a snapshot of data from today, the societies with the most capable machines are also the societies with the best standards of living and lowest unemployment rates.
No thats not what empirical data is showing. You need to account for a couple of really really important factors.
1) Population growth
2) Globalization
3) Technological acceleration
4) Cost of switching to automation
5) Monetary policies to keep economy going
6) The way employment are measured
Unemployment rates aren't what you think they are. In the US 95% of the jobs created since 2010 are temp jobs not actual structurally solid jobs. Furthermore the wages are stagnating while the cost of living is soaring.
So you are looking at this from the wrong angel. Empirical data all points to the fact that humans in normal jobs makes less and less money because their role as a function of the given industry are diminishing. Only a small group of people actually experience growth (and accelerating too).
Many economists say there is no need to worry. They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering. These economists say that when technology destroys jobs, people find other jobs. ...
As one economist argued: "Since the dawn of the industrial age, a recurrent fear has been that technological change will spawn mass unemployment. Neoclassical economists predicted that this would not happen, because people would find other jobs, albeit possibly after a long period of painful adjustment. By and large, that prediction has proven to be correct." ...
These economists are definitely right about the long period of painful adjustment! The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million. The stabilizing influence of the modern social welfare state emerged only after World War II, nearly 200 years on from the 18th-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. ...
Today, as globalization and automation dramatically boost corporate productivity, many workers have seen their wages stagnate. The increasing power of automation and artificial intelligence technology means more pain may follow. Are these economists minimizing the historical record when projecting the future, essentially telling us not to worry because in a century or two things will get better?
The author's answer is, WE SHOULD WORRY, because the adjustment already is and in the near term will continue to be painful. It's hard to disagree with him.
This article brings to mind John Maynard Keynes's most famous quote: "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again."[1]
One interpretation would be that civilization needn't worry over the large scale, but people born into an certain time periods certainly do need to worry - particularly when it appears that the economy might veer off course with a correction not apparent within their own or their children's lifetimes.
I used to design and build high speed packaging machinery. When I started my apprenticeship in the late 90's I saw machine lines running at 6000 units per minute with 3-4 operators per line and regular maintenance performed by a team of skilled engineers. Mid 2000's it was 10,000 units per minute, 2 operators per line and periodic maintenance performed by a skilled engineer. In 2012 I visited a factory with row upon row of machines running at 20,000 units per minute, fully automated lorry loading for dispatch and the machines diagnosed their own preventative maintenance. There was a guy wandering around with a broom. Two years later I jumped and changed industry.
Looks like each time they took a person out of the loop the machines got faster, and the factory increased in capacity. I think this is the true benefit of automation. The cost reductions from 4-1 operators is pretty minimal. The increase from 6,000 units a minute to many lines with 20,000 units a minute is where the money is.
Quite right. The production facilities do tend to shift to less expensive regions for labour too though, which does increase the impact. The first factory was in the UK, the second Poland, the third was in China. The UK one doesn't exist anymore.
But thats because you are only looking at it from the perspective of the parents example. Now extrapolate further and keep some of sort accelleration in mind and you will see that the next step which is cost reduction from 1-4 factories.
In the past 15 years, the labor force participation rate has dropped 4%. I would argue that this is an indicator that we are already permanently losing jobs to automation, and this trend will rapidly increase going forward, as automation gains momentum. I lean conservative/libertarian on social issues, but I am adamant that we're going to need a "living wage" stipend for the people who simply don't have enough skills to participate in the future job market. I would further argue that unemployment and various entitlements are bridging the gap for now, but what's happening will become explicit in the near future, because it will soon be too obvious to hide.
For a long time, I complained that the US couldn't afford such a thing, but we've been running a huge deficit for decades, and no one seems to care, so why should we let a budget hold us back from things like a living wage and free higher education and a single-payer insurance system and any other entitlement you want to tack on?
> I lean conservative/libertarian on social issues,
Aren't they opposites?
> For a long time, I complained that the US couldn't afford such a thing, but we've been running a huge deficit for decades, and no one seems to care,
One mistake that people make is believing that no deficit is a good thing. Running a deficit is like borrowing to fund college.
Another is that money is worth something. If as a generation all the wealth was owned by rich retired unproductive people, but the only way that food is generated is from poor working people, the elderly are screwed. Savings are not value, they are a hope that the future generations as a whole will be kind enough to work for old people based only on how much old people did when they were productive.
If future generations decide they will not pay any attention to old people's money, what happens then? What do I care that in 1960 you worked 60 hour weeks saving $500,000 in assets. Why shouldn't my generation decide "lets reduce the value of the dollar to 10% of it's current value, and lets put a massive tax on assets to redistribute to working people (say swapping income tax for an asset tax). That way I only owe rich people 1 year's salary in debt, not 10, my wage would simply have a zero added to the end (as would prices). The tax relief would mean a real wage increase too.
> Why shouldn't my generation decide "lets reduce the value of the dollar to 10% of it's current value
You just rediscovered something that Marxists had concluded long ago: class wealth is a product of political control, not the other way around. If a class of people takes control of government, they can rewrite laws and the economic system to favor them, instead of the previous ruling class. That's the whole basis of the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat".
> > I lean conservative/libertarian on social issues,
> Aren't they opposites?
Not OP, but not necessarily. Basically, Libertarians strongly support civil liberties in many forms. That can mean supporting drug legalization (liberal) and also gun rights (conservative). It can also mean supporting an individual's right to discriminate in private business transactions (men's or all-white golf clubs, hetero-only bakeries) which would likely be viewed as a really conservative social stance.
Many Libertarians also strongly support States' Rights, which tend to lean conservative.
>> I lean conservative/libertarian on social issues,
>Aren't they opposites?
It's sad that everything about American politics casts every issue in black and white, either/or, polar-opposites mentality, and must be labelled. I was just trying to "get on paper" for context with my post.
> Running a deficit is like borrowing to fund college.
That may have been the most unfortunate example you could have used, since so many people are not seeing the value of their education in the marketplace pay off that investment in a reasonable period. Regardless, I understand what you're saying, but if you're trying to tell me that the deficit that the US federal government consistently runs is a planned, strategic effort, I'm not buying it. ;-)
The government is either going to have a cash outlay or cash influx as a direct mirror of its deficit or surplus, respectively. If the government runs a surplus then entities outside the government are, on balance, giving it cash. That's like a bribe from foreign entities. But a deficit is like the government outlaying cash. This is necessary, btw, for the US dollar to be the defacto currency of the world. Believe me, if you want the US government to succeed or at least be stable then you want it to keep its status as the defacto world currency.
It's not but keep in mind with no debt, there is no US treasury market. You have to have a little bit of it.
Having said that, government debt is a little different from personal or business debt for a couple of major reasons:
1. Government's don't die. If they do, debt is the least of your worries.
2. Governments can control inflation and print money.
Having said that, I'm not agreeing our amount of debt is good or even ok, it's just there are different things to consider and it isn't really analogous to personal or business debt.
> Why shouldn't my generation decide "lets reduce the value of the dollar to 10% of it's current value, and lets put a massive tax on assets to redistribute to working people
Reducing th3 dollar's value will me1n that your imports will be ten times more expensive..
And for the tax, it will mean that all the people who can invest abroad instead of in the US will do it before the tax is applied..
> And that company that builds that iPhone of yours? Uses a LOT of very fleshy robots.
And Tesla, which just built a single factory designed to produce 500,000 vehicles a year with ONLY robots? People are watching. If this succeeds (and I suspect it will), there's going to be a LOT more attempts at such a thing.
That factory is already out of space, with production far below 500k. In fact, it's less efficient and employs more people than it did before Tesla bought it.
Tesla uses far more workers than NUMMI employed to build far fewer cars. In 1985, its first full year of production, NUMMI had 2,470 employees and produced 64,764 vehicles — about 26 vehicles per worker per year. By 1997, it had 4,844 workers and produced 357,809 vehicles — about 74 vehicles per worker per year.
Tesla, on the other hand, had between 6,000 and 10,000 workers in 2016 and manufactured 83,922 vehicles. That puts its vehicle-per-worker number between 8 and 14, about one-seventh the efficiency of NUMMI at its peak.
I like Tesla, but Elon often talks about the future like it exists today. One day they'll be able to completely automate that factory, but first they need to become as efficient as the other auto manufacturers that already exist today.
Automation of production is something that all of auto manufacturers have pushed... and Tesla is far behind on that metric. I would not assume they get to full automation before Ford, GM, Toyota, etc.
> I lean conservative/libertarian on social issues, but I am adamant that we're going to need a "living wage" stipend for the people who simply don't have enough skills to participate in the future job market
It's funny, because I lean liberal and I don't. I think there will be plenty of jobs for a long time. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is it possible what you're saying reflects some sort of bias you have about the inherent value of people who are less _____ than you? Can you say a little bit about what these supposedly useless/unmarketable people are like, what they have spent their time doing and why their skills have no value?
My hypothesis is different than yours: The pendulum in the employer class has swung towards authoritarian control over the last 50 years. Employers have tried to organize both their business and society so that employees either have fewer choices, or believe they have fewer choices.
Employers have organized things such that people are afraid to leave their jobs, through norms like employer-provided health insurance. They have pushed important work like customer service into an "hourly" category, which is considered unskilled, where wages can remain stagnant.
These norms benefit all employers, and can't easily be "shorted" by a single organization paying their employees their true value. To extract the true value from those workers you'd need to have a continually expanding management apparatus to provide space for those employees to grow into, and you run into scaling issues. Therefore the mispriced labor can only be "shorted" by a federated system of many businesses making the play together.
But the pendulum is swinging back. People are waking up to the idea that if they can contract themselves out to multiple clients, they can have leverage to extract their actual market rate from employers.
And software will eventually provide the market for the federated play I describe.
> People are waking up to the idea that if they can contract themselves out to multiple clients, they can have leverage to extract their actual market rate from employers.
The people who are living this lifestyle ("gig"-only, or multiple part time jobs) seem to dislike it. Their income is unpredictable and highly variable, while their expenses are consistent and difficult to meet.
Please note that I'm not talking about software development consultants - I'm talking about Uber drivers and service industry hourly workers.
> is it possible what you're saying reflects some sort of bias you have about the inherent value of people who are less _____ than you?
I'm puzzled by the question. Aren't we already seeing it? When it takes a 4-year degree to do an office clerk's job, doesn't this already indicate that people who can't get a degree are being phased out of the job market? If the employers with menial positions have enough selectivity in the job pool to weed out people without a degree -- for jobs that do NOT require them -- doesn't that, in itself, show that we're running out of jobs for people? I'm being simplistic for the sake of brevity, but it seems to me that there's a whole class of people (non-college-grads) that are being weeded out of the job market as we speak.
I see it as a failure to capture value. Your belief is based on the perfect market hypothesis ("If there were a way to capture value from those employees someone would be doing it") but the landscape is changing so fast due to software, I just don't think you can make that claim.
I think the old systems of employment have mostly run their course and are on the decline, but new systems based on loosely federated networks of independent contractors will replace them. Right now the tools are weak, but will get better. So we're in a kind of gap right now, where the old system has optimized on a local maximum that is leading to unemployment, but the new system hasn't quite formed to take over those employees. Increased unemployment will increase the pressure for the tools to stand up.
What makes you think the new system will be sustainable, or loosely federated? If we go by the known examples of Uber and AirBnB, the new tools produce environments where power is even more concentrated, and independent contractors are squeezed to the lowest viable income levels by competition.
And what are the dynamics of this new system upon which the GP can assume that everyone will find a place in it?
How many people has Google Apps for Business already put out of work? I've "gigged" setting up this sort of thing for small companies with Linux, and continue to do it for my medium-sized church. However, this market has changed DRAMATICALLY within the past 5 years. My church payed the money to switch. Even the Fortune 150 I work for has now outsourced its email and messaging, from in-house Notes, to hosted Office365. That represents HUNDREDS of internal admins that are simply no longer needed in one of the largest manufacturers in the country. Even someone with experience and specialized knowledge in basic networking and services (email/file & print/DNS/DHCP) will have a hard time finding "gigs" going forward with Google Apps and Office365 in the market. It's just too easy! A kid who grew up with a smartphone is all you need to set it up.
We, as a society, are already leveraging the efforts of a relative tiny few to alleviate the work of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, just in IT services, and this grows exponentially by the year. Twenty years ago, the trade mags were raging on "cloud" everything. It took 10 years to figure out that it just meant "someone else's computer." Now it means a web portal to configure everything you need and take your money.
I'm also good at hardware (microcontroller-based machines) and business domain programming. Sure, I figure I'll have work until I'm dead, but I see what's happening with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, and the "internet of things." I know it's crap, but when Joe Blow can buy the junk from Amazon, throw it in his home and office, and it does essentially what it's supposed to do, what's the difference to him? That trend is also going to continue to scale out so that more and more things that would have taken custom hardware and software will be recognized as a market need, and product-ized.
At each step, more and more people just aren't needed to make what everyone wants or needs, because of market dynamics like the parent alludes to: all home appliances being made by less than a handful of companies. All entertainment being copyrighted by 4 companies. All IT being controlled by about 6. All cell services in the hands of (essentially) 2. All broadband in 4. On and on it goes. All endeavors trend towards monopoly in a capitalistic system, and I don't see any way for the US government to reign that in at this point, with regulatory capture being operative phrase of the day.
I'm glad someone's hopeful about how my grandchildren are going to find their place in society. I'm holding my breath.
There's a severe shortage of quality jobs and people who want those jobs. An unbelievably high percentage of Americans are either underemployed or working low paying low quality dead-end jobs. Even if this were a small percentage, the fact that even a single person has to suffer or go homeless due to their not being an employer willing to hire this person for a quality job is reason enough for a "living wage".
You suggested that the commenter might be biased against those people and feel above them. Those who oppose a living wage for everyone are the ones who tend to have this attitude because they believe that poverty is the individual's fault.
The last 15 years has also seen an economy that has underperformed on GDP and wage growth. And while labor force participation has dropped, the unemployment rate is below historical average.
That's not an economy that looks like it has permanently automated away net 4% jobs.
That's an economy that looks like it automated away some jobs, created more new jobs, but companies can't find workers to fill them.
>Many economists say there is no need to worry ... specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
The fact that many economists state this is, if true, a pretty strong condemnation of the current state of that field of endeavor.
>Until very recently, the global educated professional class didn't recognize what was happening to working- and middle-class people in developed countries. But now it is about to happen to them.
but economists don't foresee job losses in their own ranks
If the Industrial Revolution is any analogue, there will be plenty of inter-state wars, revolutions within states and competing ideologies within a few decades...
The optimist in me says that there's been a period of 70 years or so without major wars between different state powers, and maybe MAD will hold up -- but in the theme of prologues repeating themselves...
To expand/paraphrase, the industrial Revolution was about improving the productivity of human labor. Automation and AI is about replacing human labor entirely.
If economists said that as a rule, automation improvements lead to better jobs for horses you would call them crazy. But when they say it as a rule for humans it suddenly makes total sense. Horses were replaced by cars. Humans can be replaced by AI.
> Automation and AI is about replacing human labor entirely.
Is it?
What happened in the past was that people stopped being handy with a scythe and started getting handy fixing tractors. That's "replacing human labor entirely" in the exact same way that replacing a welder with someone who can program a welding robot is.
How is this different? The supposed AI which is better than every human at every task is sci-fi. If we're talking about real AIs and real robots we're just not there, and strides in that direction continue to be spotty, as they have been for the last 30 years.
The concern is that automated systems will become better-than-human at enough tasks of economic importance that involuntary joblessness will significantly increase. The usual counter-argument is "human wants are infinite," implying that there will always be sufficient demand for new kinds of or additional quantities of paid human employment to counterbalance labor saving techniques. But that argument neglects time to reach a new equilibrium. It neglects that people displaced from old industries may not be able to fill newer jobs even if they had years to retrain. It neglects that a major human want is leisure time, and leisure time not spent consuming or producing does not contribute to paid employment.
Something like 20% of jobs are moving stuff around. Drivers, warehouse workers, truckers. What happens with self driving vehicles doing that? (the great depression was 25% unemployment).
People stopped being farmers and were able to pursue other industries. But there were still farmers, and a whole support economy of new jobs to support the new method of farming. AI is going to be the farmer driving the tractor, the person who repairs the tractor, the system that manufactures new tractor parts, the person that drives it, a large amount of the support designing new tractors (even if there were 100 competing brands of tractors there are a limited number of people required for research and design and maintenance of the automation (not enough to replace 2.1 million farmers, let alone the millions of factory workers, mechanics, and delivery people), and the AI can even do most of that themselves too soon).
To me this entire argument "woe us if we run out of work to do" is directly self-contradictory. If people are miserable because they don't have the necessities of life, then, by definition, there's work left to do. On the other hand if there really is no work left to do, then everybody should be perfectly content with their material wealth.
The problem is automation could conceivably create a (sufficiently) closed system wherein a capitalist class can fulfil their desires for material wealth with minimal need for labor, while the masses lack access to the means of creating wealth (i.e. the tools of automation) or even fulfilling the basic necessities of life.
"We should listen not only to economists when it comes to predicting the future of work; we should listen also to historians, who often bring a deeper historical perspective to their predictions."
> In the U.S., for example, income of production workers today, adjusted for inflation, is essentially at the level it was around 1970.
I have a legitimate question about the usefulness of this statistic.
Everyday living has dramatically improved since the 1970s. There's been massive improvements in medical care, for starters. Communication and finding information has never been better thanks to computers, the Internet, search engines, wikipedia, etc. Entertainment has never had more options, and the options have never been this good. There's smartphones, of course: They made the internet accessible everywhere, and provide a platform for some incredibly useful apps (e.g., Uber/Lyft). There's been dramatic innovation since 1970, including: microwaves, GPS, home video, text messaging, MRIs, HIV treatment, smoke detectors, and on and on and on.
These technological improvements are not reflected in income statistics, but they're extremely important to every-day living.
Are there statistics that try and encapsulate technological improvement along with the normal measures of economic improvement? It's totally possible that wages are stagnant, but you get triple the utility out of your money than you would've in the 1970s.
I think the prevailing view on living standards is that they're no longer rising for those who enter the workforce at the bottom. If your parents can send you to college, you'll probably do well. But If not, since tuition costs have skyrocketed in the past 20 years, you'll no longer able to send yourself to college, so your prospects will be limited.
Likewise, for those at the bottom of the job market, employers offer far more modest benefits to further your development (like tuition reimbursement), thereby closing yet another door to upskilling and advancement.
> I think the prevailing view on living standards is that they're no longer rising for those who enter the workforce at the bottom.
Hmm, how is "living standards" defined exactly?
It seems like many of the technological advancements of the last 40 years have become cheap and affordable by almost everyone. Even smart phones are relatively inexpensive and widely used. 64% of individuals making less than $30k a year own a smart phone, for example [1].
Life seems to be getting better for all income levels. Though, this isn't easy to track statistically. The citation I was originally responding to (an article on stagnating income vs inflation [2]) uses CPI as the measure of inflation. But the CPI only tracks the prices of basic commodities like food and fuel. It misses a huge part of our lives.
I'd argue that there were even larger lifestyle improvements during the industrial revolution period before 1970 and real wages also grew substantially.
>>Many economists say there is no need to worry. They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
Nonetheless, the "economist consensus" is that there "is need to worry" and the article linked to is a (well written!) exception to the current groupthink.
This is in spite of the inconvenient fact that labor productivity is down.
As for the "widespread suffering caused by automation" - I don't see ANY evidence that it was caused by unemployment caused by "too much automation". The industrial revolution induced more suffering primarily because of new weaponry that presaged industrial-scale slaughter.
As before, the real job stealer isn't a robot, it's a man in a suit executing a trade deal with countries that still practise literal slavery, blaming your lack of a job paying > 5¢ an hour on a robot.
It's a no brainer that the coming change will cause people fear for their livelihood. And fear is a great motivator. It will not matter if the fear of automation is true or not, there will be a lot unrest.
And universal basic housing and universal basic education. Then everyone would really be free to be entrepreneurs, but they wouldn't have to fixate on profit seeking at the expense of all else.
I must be missing something here. Unemployment rate right now is barely above 4% despite the significant push for automation in manufacturing, drastic downsizing in
retail, accounting, movie rental, newspaper industries etc without that much global impact.
What is it that's new and so threatening automation-wise that is going to have drastic effect on ppl's lives comparable to the industrial revolution?
Indeed, productivity growth (the rate of automation) is fairly low now. A lot of the big stories about automation killing jobs started popping up after the financial crisis, ignoring the actual reasons for the job loss (the financial crisis that had just devastated the global economy) in order to push a particular viewpoint. Though it was claimed that automation had permanently destroyed certain jobs and was about to destroy many more (and that the rate that this was going to happen was about dramatically), labor force participation has actually been going up since then.
This is starting to remind me of peak oil, where it's become an article of faith among some people that there's a disaster right around the corner, and no amount of failed predictions or facts pointing to the contrary are going to convince them otherwise.
movie rentals and newspapers are small industries, with slow change. i don't think accounting has seen large scale downsizing.
As for retail, i got curious, so: "Stores are closing because of the rise of e-commerce and shifts in how people spend their money," said Deb Gabor, CEO of Sol Marketing a brand/retail strategy consultancy. "Shoppers are devoting bigger shares of their wallets to entertainment, restaurants and technology, and spending less on clothing and accessories." [1]
Retail has revenue per employee of ~$450K. Restaurants have about $150K revenue per employee. So money is shifting to the more labor intensive industries, and maybe this is true even while including tech and entertainment.
But this is just a small scale, relatively to what could be coming. And people's spending patterns may not be so supportive of humans.
>> movie rentals and newspapers are small industries, with slow change.
Ok, fair enough. So then what are those large and fast-paced industries that are under the immediate and severe threat due to automation?
I mean for something to be on par with industrial revolution there has to be a pretty profound impact all over the place, the kind of impact that the existing ways of doing things can't adapt to at all (kind of how retail has been adapting to e-commerce with mixed results over the course of the past 15+ years).
Is retail adapting to e-commerce ? Or is it mostly a really slow decline ? This question is still unanswered If you look at the Amazon's recent fashion growth and walmart's grocery pick up.
As for what big industries are under immediate threat ? I'm not sure about how rapid, but in almost every industry you look you see a lot of real term deep innovation(from startups) that, if successful would greatly reduce jobs. Think not only automation but electric cars and mechanics and plant based meat and farmers.
That, combined with the fact that we are maybe starting to be able to mechanize the key skills of humans:dexterity and thinking, seem quite a huge change.
And maybe we can adapt - but we don't hear almost any ideas at all for many more new jobs, even with creativity of the net so maybe massive unemployment is a possibility?
>> Is retail adapting to e-commerce ? Or is it mostly a really slow decline ?
It's both, really. For some retailers with brick-and-mortar shops online presence is a way to expand their market, for others - internet is slow death.
But again nothing drastic in terms of job reduction has happened overnight even though the whole "internet thing" changed the way things are done drastically af.
>> And maybe we can adapt - but we don't hear almost any ideas at all for many more new jobs...
It's hard to predict these things. But again I'm not buying the "zomg there will be riots" spiel. If anything there will be a whole set of new (or subset of existing) industries along the lines of how adoption of the internet-based tech spawned them.
Let's think about the Internet(in 1994) but in the abstract:
It was a new medium. New mediums create new advertising and content industries around them. So did the Internet. They also create many jobs to manage/improve the technical stuff - That's also true.
It's also a great distribution channel for software and goods. we've known this pretty early. and new distribution channels reduce a business cost thus increasing demand. They also create changes along the whole supply chain, so that's more work.
But the surprising fact about the net is it's ability to enable businesses targeting very tiny niches. But if you talked to a many direct marketing guys back in the day, before the net and explained to them about the technical possibilities of the internet(and moore's law and powerful computing) and let them think about it, one in a 10-100, would have told you: this could be great for small targeted businesses.
Or maybe that guy is working in prediction, or science fiction, etc.
But today we have blogs,and media business who would kill for an eyeball, so we should be able to hear from that smart guy .
So why aren't we hearing stories about all those possible new jobs ?
>> why aren't we hearing stories about all those possible new jobs ?
you tell me :) I'm not 100% sure why the automation narrative has primarily been of the "impending doom" variety.
I think just like with the internet - even if automation does take off big time there will be some "victims" but also new possibilities from the obvious ones - like manufacturing, supporting/updating, installing the "robots" to some things we (speaking for myself lol) can't envision until this actually happens.
Both wage rates and employment stability (duration of a given employment, or even career) are significant elements of labour dynamics not captured by employment statistics, and most critically, unemployment measures.
I'm a big proponent of UBI, but I have to admit, many new jobs got created, despite the call that automation would make us all obsolete.
I think the problem isn't that automation kills jobs, it's that nobody cares about people who worked in these jobs for >10 years and don't know anything other.
I'm not saying we should allow everyone to become a pilot or medical doctor after working 30 years as a trucker, but I think we should at least try to work in this direction.
I think that there are two big differences between the Industrial Revolution and similar past increases in automation and what is happening now.
1. The workers then were displaced in many (most?) cases by newly invented physical machines. Those machines had to be built in brand new factories, employing many workers. Building those machines greatly boosted the need for many resources, such as metals, lubricants, fuels, and wood, so indirectly created many jobs in those industries. The machines needed frequent and regular maintenance, spawning even more jobs and industries.
What's going on now seems different. Our automation nowadays involves much less new physical machines. As an example, consider self driving big rig trucks, which some think will be the first self driving vehicles to displace a large number of workers.
What is the difference between a self driving big rig and a regular big rig? The self driving one is essentially a regular one with some additions:
• some sensors,
• some motors or actuators to operate controls,
• one or more computers that run the driving software, and handle the interface with the human who is in charge,
• maybe some kind of wireless communication system so the driving software can receive orders from the trucking company if that's not handled by a human who accompanies the truck.
None of these things are new. What's new is putting them in a truck.
Let's focus on the computers. Let's be optimistic and assume that every single new big rig that comes off the assembly line is equipped from the factory for self driving, so every single one needs a computer. Let's further assume that they use a high end GPU to run the AI software.
Putting a high end GPU in every single new big rig in the US would raise total annual demand for high end GPUs by about 10%. That's not "build a new factory" territory. That's "authorize a little overtime at the GPU factory" territory.
It's similar for other things. Each big rig now has a few electric motors so the AI can steer and shift gears and brake...but as with GPUs that's just a small bump in the total demand.
Worse, many of these things, like the GPUs, the sensors, probably the motors, and probably the communications system are built in highly automated factories, so even if the factories have to kick up production with overtime or even add new shifts, it will be machines getting the new work.
2. During the Industrial Revolution we had large, rapidly expanding frontiers.
If you were in the developed part of your country and lost your job to a machine there was a good chance you could go to the frontier and find a similar job that was safe from the machines because the frontier lacked the infrastructure to support the machine.
Our frontiers now, to the extent that we even have any, are small and not expanding much if at all, and we've gotten a lot better at getting our machines there.
Oh my god why are there so many people here who don't understand. UBI wont work. If you just think further than the extent of your nose; consider a 2-person society; a fisher and a fishnet maker. They live off eachothers work. Then give them this fantastic UBI. It's so great, the wealth gets distributed and they both have income without having to have a job. Ok. So fisherman goes to fishnet maker and gives him 100$ and says make me some fishnets please. Fishnet maker says nah, why should i? I have this fantastic UBI so i don't have to work. Btw i'd like to buy fish from you here is 100$. Fisherman says nah, you know i got this UBI. WAOW SUCH GREAT, UBI, AMAZE, BEST, SMART, PROGRESSIVE
In before anybody mentions "universal basic income", I want to remind that it was exactly the major selling point of Communism: machines will raise productivity to such levels that nobody will even need money, as material products will be plentiful for everyone.
This grand vision was unsustainable and led to millions of deaths.
Universal basic income is no less unsustainable (even government retirement and pension funds, which require much less money, are struggling everywhere). I really can hope that this false promise will not lead to similar catastrophes.
UBI was never a "selling point" for Communism (except if you have a very vulgar concept of Communism), quite the opposite it's what sustains Capitalism beyond the point it should have already had died off.
I am Russian, I went to a Soviet school, and I am quite aware what was and what wasn't a selling point for Communism. It was -- down to being mentioned in every socialist realism book, in nearly every major TV report, even as a running joke. There was a line in a popular Soviet movie: "no more worries, no more rat race, robots are toiling, man is happy" -- and this line was taken at a face value, as a defining feature of the future Communist utopia we were all building.
Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval. Average height of Englishman decreased before started to increase (based on military records). Workers started to organize, skulls were cracked. People were shot in the streets. Armies were ordered to kill workers. There were bloody civil wars and revolutions.
Industrial revolution was not possible without massive social change that created, land reforms, working class, middle class and increased private consumption and accumulation of capital. It was at times bloody, but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained. Not so in Soviet Union or China.
Anti-Union violence, Union violence (union busting) communist violence, anticommunist violence was pretty intense at time even when the society as whole worked.
Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties. We can still list numerous conflicts with 10-100 deaths: The Molly Maguire trials (20 workers executed), Battle of Virden, 1898 Colorado labor war,Italian Hall disaster, Ludlow massacre, Thibodaux Massacre, Pullman Strike, West Virginia Coal Wars, Rock Springs massacre, 1905 Chicago Teamsters' strike, Steel Strike of 1919, The Herrin Massacre, 1922, Battle of Blair Mountain, Hanapēpē massacre, Harlan County War, Memorial Day massacre of 1937.
Future of Automation will create wealth and prosperity beyond all our dreams, but it requires massive political struggle that settles issues like privacy, rent seeking, ownership of personal information.
Violence in the street may be positive sign that automation is finally changing our society.