Automation and the Future of Work (or Lack Thereof)

[The Man]

This Jacobin article from five years ago is likely to become even more relevant as time passes.

Four Futures | Jacobin

We live in a time when it's becoming possible to create almost anything with almost no human input, apart from the design phase. Earlier this year, researchers 3D printed a functional artificial organ for mice. This was widely regarded as the Rubicon for 3D printing, so at this point it's not a matter of whether 3D printing displaces traditional manufacturing, but when. Soon, the only requisite human input for all but the most complicated projects will be in the design process. This includes food, which will displace agriculture.

At this point the concern becomes with the transportation and distribution of resources. However, transportation will also be displaced by an emerging technology, namely that of self-driving cars. There are still some hurdles left for this to overcome before it becomes fully viable, and it's probably going to take at least ten years longer to displace the economy than 3D printing will. While there are some sceptics, it seems likely to happen within the lifetimes of many people posting here.

Energy, too, is a concern, but we are reaching a tipping point here as well. Current estimates are that solar power will become cheaper than any other energy source by 2020. It will probably take at least another decade or so for this to become widespread enough to displace our current sources of energy, but at some point it will become obvious that it is more economical to use solar power than it will be to use any other energy source, and energy production will cease to be a serious concern. (This isn't to say that the issues of climate change will have been solved when that happened, since we've already passed a number of unpleasant milestones, but that's a matter for another thread.)

That leads the question of how to handle the inevitable job losses. There will be new jobs. 3D printers will require maintenance. 3D printing as a source of manufacturing will require research, development, testing, and implementation. The roads for self-driving cars will very likely require significant modifications to existing road systems, and will require maintenance once these modifications are done. The installation of enough solar panels to power the world (which is easily doable) will require work and maintenance, as well.

But most of these are temporary jobs, and it's questionable whether even when they are underway, the workforce required to do this will outnumber the workforce that will be displaced by the coming technological changes. That leads to a number of economic problems, and they could be dealt with in ways that would be quite pleasant for humanity, but they could also be dealt with in ways that would be quite unpleasant for most people on the planet. So it's worth thinking about, and preparing for, these ahead of time.

Simply put, the likely outcome of this is severe under- or unemployment. The traditional mechanisms of capitalism, at least temporarily, will cease to function, because significant portions of the populace will no longer have adequate, or any, income. Western democracies may have some mechanisms to deal with this through unemployment insurance and the like, but most of them are designed with the idea that 5% unemployment is the usual goal. That obviously won't be the case if, to pick a number out of thin air, 50% of the workforce is unemployed. And poorer countries won't have an obvious resource to be able to deal with the collapse of their manufacturing sectors, which, for many of them, supplies most of their economy.

That leaves a number of possible solutions. For third-world countries, the only particularly helpful solution I can come up with is extreme debt relief and transfers of wealth to their citizens. There are a number of mechanisms that could be used to accomplish this; I haven't studied the subject well enough to speculate on which would be the best of them. I'm open to ideas.

First-world countries have a number of possible solutions, as well. One is to mandate a maximum amount of time someone is allowed to work for pay per week, and then mandate severe wage increases. People are calling for $15/hour minimum wage in the current economy. Assuming no inflation, and assuming the tipping point for automation had been reached, we could instead call for $30/hour minimum wage and also mandate a maximum 20-hour workweek for everyone. Theoretically, this could work, but it might be inefficient.

My preferred solution is, and has been for a rather long time, basic income. The idea is that everyone gets a living wage regardless of whether they are employed or not. This provides additional incentive for people to keep working for pay, but it does not punish people who are not able to find suitable employment. It seems awfully utopian and politically infeasible right now, but if we reach 50% unemployment, it'll have a much more realistic chance of occurring. It actually has wide support among economists; even right-wing economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman supported forms of it (Friedman called his proposal a "negative income tax", but meant something extremely similar by it). One advantage of a basic income is that it requires much less administration than other forms of welfare, making it more efficient to distribute. (Given that I have been navigating the labyrinthine and faceless Social Security bureaucracy for the last eight months, this is particularly pertinent to me.)

If we don't pursue one of these outcomes... well, the Jacobin article goes into some things that can happen if we don't pursue some form of relief for the people who will be displaced by technological changes, and they aren't pretty. Most of the forum regulars here wouldn't like them at all.

Creative destruction has certainly occurred several times in the past, of course, and economies usually respond to it eventually. The problem, naturally, is that they don't respond immediately. Widespread automation could lead to focus on new tasks, such as terraforming other planets, which would certainly create new jobs. But that wouldn't happen overnight. Furthermore, changes in technology can result in major societal changes. (For instance, modern capitalism hasn't exactly been the dominant economy for all of recorded history.) It's important, therefore, to anticipate upcoming changes and try to make them as benevolent as possible, because widescale automation could be quite pleasant for humanity, but it could also lead to a Robocop-style dystopia.

Anyway, I don't have much else to add right now, but this is something that definitely needs to be talked about already, and is likely only to become an even more urgent topic in the near future. I'm interested on the thoughts of other people here about this as well.

[Vivisectus]

Basic income is not so outlandish as all that - we have a city in the Netherlands that is trying it out as we speak, and I hear there are cantons in Switzerland that are trying a different version of it.

[ceptimus]

I think automated manufacture will continue to grow and eventually will displace most workers - so I agree with the general thrust of the article.

But I think it's wrong to over-emphasize the roll of 3D printing. 3D printing has its place but is likely to remain expensive and slow for mass production. It's great for prototyping and limited production runs, but alternative manufacturing techniques like casting, injection moulding, pressing, and CNC machining are likely to remain more cost effective for volume production.

[JoeP]

Finland has proposals that have been floating about for a while. Finland considers basic income to reform welfare system - BBC News

In goggling for this I came across BIEN |*Basic Income Earth Network and of course Basic income - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

[JoeP]

In fact, in line with what cep said above, I think this thread really points to two largely independent topics:

1. How much will automation decrease the amount of employment, and how significant will the effects of that be?
2. Is a basic income a good plan? What features does it need to overcome possible drawbacks?

One might almost be tempted to be so bold as to suggest that some form of thread split might be in order.

[SR71]

I know it has been a truism, even a truism with a good basis in truth, that automation has freed us from drudgery (there used to be a lot of that, still is, depending on where you live, other circumstances) to focus on more creative endeavors. I really believe though, that this time is different. Machines can't think, but they can certainly collect information and follow instructions based on the information they collect. We're at a point where it may be (probably would be?) cheaper to have machines do your check out at the grocer, stock inventory and pick and pack in warehouses, do remote diagnostics on complicated electro-mechanical systems, I don't know what all. What do you do when you've been made redundant by a machine and everyone already has all the machines they need and the machines are maintaining themselves?

[SR71]

Maybe we could build pyramids for oligarchs? Do you think they want pyramids?

[ceptimus]

Self driving cars (and trucks) will put a large number of people out of work.

The technology is still developing, but arguably it's already good enough to let trucks drive themselves along major roads. The trucks would then stop at depots situated next to major road junctions where human drivers could take over for the final part of the journey through towns and to help carry out the loading/unloading at the final destination.

Eventually the self-driving technology will improve to the point where truck drivers aren't needed at all, but just the major road part would eliminate lots of jobs. How many thousands of drivers are employed piloting trucks along motorways, interstates, whatever you call them, right at this moment?

[Jerome]

Originally Posted by ceptimus

The technology is still developing, but arguably it's already good enough to let trucks drive themselves along major roads.

Not even close, a Tesla just ran into a bus on a German highway.

If the technology can't recognize a bus on the relatively static and safe highways, how can it navigate busy chaotic city streets?

[ceptimus]

I already said that human drivers would take over (for now) in chaotic city/town streets.

And the technology for highways doesn't have to be perfect - just better than the (pretty low) standard of current human drivers. It's not like a human driver has never driven into a bus, for example.

[Jerome]

Well, California and Germany can fill their highways with driver-less trucks, then we can just see how well it works.

[ceptimus]

Originally Posted by Jerome

Well, California and Germany can fill their highways with driver-less trucks, then we can just see how well it works.

Exactly. And if the statistics show that there are less accidents in California and Germany as a result, then other states and countries will be clamouring to adopt driver-less trucks too.

[Jerome]

Its all pie in the sky nonsense, just like flying cars.

Its a scam for people like you to support the government transferring wealth from the working class to the elite class for future promises of flying cars.

Star Trek is not real, it is fascist propaganda.

[Crumb]

[Jerome]

$4 billion from government for just this one proposed program. How much has Musk collected from government for his for profit schemes?

Taking from the poor to give to the rich.

Pure fascism.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-ad...nes-1452798787

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

[JoeP]

Automation = having Jerome on ignore.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by JoeP

Automation = having Jerome on ignore.

He's really fuckin' the attention seeking martyr complex edgelord chicken today. The smell of desperation is overpowering.

[Jerome]

Originally Posted by The Man

Current estimates are that solar power will become cheaper than any other energy source by 2020.

Who made this estimate?

Just another lie about the future fascists make to trick Trekkies into supporting a fascist system.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by Jerome

If the technology can't recognize a bus on the relatively static and safe highways, how can it navigate busy chaotic city streets?

The problem here is overestimation of consumer technology. The Tesla system is basically self driving car lite v1.0. Full blown self driving cars have been roaming the bay area for years now and have caused no accidents. The technology is already quite good, the issue is cost.

Which is why trucks and uber will see the first uses of the full technology as they will be willing to sink the money the full system currently needs.
As of last year the hardware for a full version self driving car was around $300k.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by R. Buckminster Fuller

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

He wrote that in 1969. I read it later than that, but I've always been pretty aware of the fact that most of my jobs have consisted of largely bullshit. Like, I'm streamlining a system that automates a system that helps people move shit around because their job is to move shit around to facilitate someone else's job, and after only maybe 10 or 15 degrees of separation, some actual concrete thing happens.

Thing is, people on the whole don't like being idle. We keep getting better at it over time, occupying ourselves with diversions, but there was this common thing in tech industries where people would pretty regularly start having fantasies about actually doing some physical thing. Quitting to become a carpenter or a farmer or a painter or a musician. And on smaller scales, people would cook and knit and brew beer and just make stuff because people like to create actual things, and I'm guessing that, if they didn't spend all their energy doing shit they have to do in order to have shit to do, most people would step up and create things that improve things for everyone.

[Ari]

To add,
I quite agree with this, although it's going to take a revolution given that even with automation humans are one of the cheapest machines out there, so long as you don't give a crap about them. We can see this in garment factories where people are still used over automated machines because people will work for pennies and automatically make replacements so they can be thrown away when they aren't performing anymore.

Hell in the US Amazon has been working on perfecting this and uses robots to augment the human robots they already employ. The current direction of capitalism is to make sure people have as little rights as robots.

There's going to need to be a demand for humane treatment as well as a reduction in our need to hoard stuff and find it as cheap as possible. Technology will bring some of this hoarding to an end as people realize just how meaningless *their* copy of something is. For example, CD or modern game collections are meaningless given easily accessible online catalogs.

Relating to self driving cars, I think we are going to see an upheaval in the concept of car ownership as well. If a car can be at your place within minutes, take you where you want to go and when finished automatically pick up the next person who needs it while monitoring and taking car of its own maintenance, just like music the idea of owning your own copy of 'car' that isn't meant as an entertainment device will become outdated and hipster.

[Jerome]

Originally Posted by Ari

Full blown self driving cars have been roaming the bay area for years now and have caused no accidents.

Nope, a Google car got confused and pulled into the side of a bus earlier this year. Google is required to publish this data with the State, its public, you can go look at it. Google admits the driver saw the bus in his mirror, but the car automatically pulled into the side of the bus before he could take control.

You not knowing this and making the claim you did makes it evident that you are completely ignorant on the subject, and are just wishing and believing, just like you do with politics.

The technology is not even close.

[Jerome]

Originally Posted by lisarea

He wrote that in 1969. I read it later than that, but I've always been pretty aware of the fact that most of my jobs have consisted of largely bullshit. Like, I'm streamlining a system that automates a system that helps people move shit around because their job is to move shit around to facilitate someone else's job, and after only maybe 10 or 15 degrees of separation, some actual concrete thing happens.

Thing is, people on the whole don't like being idle. We keep getting better at it over time, occupying ourselves with diversions, but there was this common thing in tech industries where people would pretty regularly start having fantasies about actually doing some physical thing. Quitting to become a carpenter or a farmer or a painter or a musician. And on smaller scales, people would cook and knit and brew beer and just make stuff because people like to create actual things, and I'm guessing that, if they didn't spend all their energy doing shit they have to do in order to have shit to do, most people would step up and create things that improve things for everyone.

Agreed.

This is why any system which taxes a worker on their labor is immoral.

Technology should have lessened the work load on a family, instead, somehow, the politicians tricked the people that they needed to double their output for government per family.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by Jerome

Nope, a Google car got confused and pulled into the side of a bus earlier this year..

Oh yes, sorry I forgot about the only crash to have ever happened by the self driving car while it was moving at 2mph, the horror! And the crash happened because it made the assumption the bus would yield to it as it pulled infront of the bus. Ironically replace the bus with a self driving bus and the 2mph crash wouldn't have happened.

So the technology produces a single low speed crash in 1.5 Million miles of driving.

Now what about the worst accident their system has been involved in?
Why that would be a T-bone at an intersection because a Human driver ran a red light.

Damn these humans, totally not ready yet for driving on roads!

Although this does highlight one issue, the biggest problem for self driving cars is the unpredictability of humans. No telling when those broken machines will just stop ignoring road rules. This along with fixing traffic is why I think many cities will eventually switch to self driving cars only.