
Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know - gbear605
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
======
nwah1
Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous
production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly
necessary for employment of labor.

Labor can be applied whenever labor has access to land. So the question is why
can't people just go to work? Grow their own food to feed themselves, if need
be?

The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming
became illegal, and not because they all forgot how to farm. It is simply that
farm labor couldn't pay the rent of land anymore.

The mechanisms by which the unimproved value of land rises and falls is the
key mechanism that we must understand in order to understand wages and the
rate of unemployment. Real wages are not a number. They are the lifestyle you
can obtain. They are what is left over after you've paid your taxes and your
right to exist in a particular location. (Increasingly, healthcare and
education are prerequisites to getting by in the same way.)

Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most
advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the
nature of rent. When there's no rent-free land, rents rise and fall based on
the ability to pay. People getting free money have more ability to pay, and
landlords will definitely notice.

Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. Higher demand doesn't just
stimulate supply. The supply curve is vertical.

~~~
Chris_Jay
Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem
you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no
insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated
in a few urban centers.

[https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...](https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B9EHSqWgFV7LNUxEVXk0S0ZiMlk/preview)

~~~
mncharity
> Given the possibility of remote work, [...] urban centers.

Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on
people's geographic distribution.

Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking
(researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops
with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive
finger tracking (hopefully)... perhaps it's easy to not notice these if you're
not tracking the tech? Easy to think "remote work, so video conferencing, so
limited impact - far better to do open plan offices"? Instead of "the practice
and spatial constraints of software development will change dramatically over
the next half decade".

~~~
memebox3v
Or for that matter self driving cars. You could commute for 5 hours a day,
spend 2 hours in the office and go home again. All while being productive.
That greatly increases the commutable range. Then you have the prospect of
self driving Motor homes, moving with the work becomes that much easier.

~~~
mncharity
People take commuter buses with wifi, from Pennsylvania to NYC, with a 2 to 4
hour round trip. A few commute Boston to NYC on Amtrak Acela, with a 7-ish
hour round trip (you can stand up and walk around, get coffee, etc).

------
tinokid
>"Increasingly, banks recognized the value of tellers enabled by information
technology, not primarily as checkout clerks, but as salespersons, forging
relationships with customers and introducing them to additional bank services
like credit cards, loans, and investment products."

Was this written before the Wells Fargo scandal came to light?

Hard to be optimistic when the "silver lining" is that people who were once
employed to do necessary work have since been reassigned to trawl for
opportunities to make easy money at the expense of the gullible and
vulnerable.

Sadly this appears to be yet another theme in technological advancement--the
proliferation of scams. Just look at how much social media advertising comes
from multi-level marketing schemes.

~~~
EnFinlay
That behaviour describes my biggest pet peeve with banks. I don't want product
offers from you. You take my money, make money with it, and pay me interest (a
whole < 1%). That's our relationship, fuck off with your "credit card
protection free trial period".

~~~
danaliv
That "credit card protection free trial period" is _how_ they're making money.

~~~
tensor_rank_0
originally they made money by the margin between the profit they make on wise
investments and the amount they pay in interest for the privilege of investing
money for them. those days are long gone.

------
erikrothoff
It feels like we're moving away from jobs that are purely productive, to jobs
that are more creative. I don't mean arts etc, but 50 years ago a company like
Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Any digital entertainment really, could not exist because
people were occupied work that was required for society to function. Now
humans can start focusing on spending their day building things for the
entertainment of other humans, and also choosing careers based on what they
feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.

~~~
dalbasal
There can be a substantial difference between what the company and the
employee "do."

I walk by a twitter building every day. Probably about 500 people, maybe more.
What are they doing in there? They sell ads, manage ad accounts, moderation,
data protection audits... stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now...
I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off
70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away....
but I'm not entirely not in his camp too.

Either way, that building is full of "marketing and social media" graduates
doing stuff that doesn't need to be done for twitter to be twitter. Twitter
was twitter before they had all those people.

You could call what twitter does creative work. That resonates with me. They
invented a communication method with all sorts of cultural impact and value.
That's creative. But, extending that to the median employee... I think we
might divert here.

I think you have your finger on an interesting point, even if I don't know how
to articulate it. A generation ago, a lot of the ecoomy could be measured in
stuff with value that one could reason about. Cars, tothbrushes, haircuts,
podiatrists.... You can count and weigh and value that stuff. Media was always
more abscure. The tv viewer mightn't be the customer. The purpose of a paper
might be do get a classifieds insert into your hands.

Once you throw in social/user-generate services make the picture more messy.
Once you go to Google/FB territory, it's all very obscure. Half of what they
do doesn't have any direct economic benefit to them, it's more a way of
keeping them in a massively powerful position.

I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever
increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very
ethereal things, with obscure business models...

~~~
xtrapolate

      Twitter was twitter before they had all those people.
    

Sure, but it can't scale without them. How exactly is Twitter supposed to pay
the bills? People use this platform because, for the most part, the basic
premise is entirely free. How else can they fund the infrastructure/R&D costs?

~~~
dalbasal
scaling...it did. That is it had a ton of users using essentially the same
product with a much smaller team, at one point.

Paying the bills.., IDK. Presumably they've determined that these people are
useful in this regard. Otherwise, why have them? But from a first principles
reasoning, it seems possible to sell add without thousands of ad sellers.

~~~
Hoasi
Selling advertising online could be automated for the most part, unless
Twitter really does offer personalised offering to ads buyers—which I'm not
sure is the case.

~~~
yojo
At a certain spend level, advertisers want to have a single human that they
can call when they need something/something goes wrong ("a single throat to
strangle").

Providing this dedicated connection is also an opportunity to upsell them on
more ad products.

I did this work at Google for a couple years at the start of my career. They
are an exceptionally analytics driven company, and would not employ these
kinds of people if there wasn't good ROI

------
TeMPOraL
I'm somewhat surprised by the article's conclusion, but will accept it, given
that Scott is pretty thorough with his sourcing and analysis. Even though he
says we're getting the worst outcome (something is happening, but it's not
apocalyptic, so people won't notice in time to coordinate at scale), it
shifted my internal doomsday countdown ~20 years to the future.

One thing I wonder though, and it's a general concern for such analyses - just
how reliable _are_ the official statistics? Given the unreliability at every
level (which I sometimes personally observed) - from people reporting bogus
data, data entry people faking it to make their job easier, to bogus
statistical analysis and biased reporting at the top - just how much faith we
can put in all of this? I get that it's the only thing we have, but I wonder
if someone tried to analyze those issues.

~~~
appearsonline
If I may ask, what was your internal doomsday countdown before reading the
article?

~~~
TeMPOraL
About 10-15 years before progress makes some members of my family unemployed.

~~~
appearsonline
Depending on how representative your family is of the overall population, that
could mean that the doomsday scenario for most people is already here.

------
TangoTrotFox
A really surprising thing here is that their analysis is also based on an
somewhat unrealistically negative datum. They're using the labor force
participation rate. The labor force participation rate counts people who are
happy to not work, which is not a problem - and probably to be expected as the
total number of upper and rich class individuals increases over time as a
share of society. A much more useful measurement is the U6 unemployment rate.
The U6 counts people who are involuntary part time (want full time work but
can't find it) as well as those who want to work but who are no longer
actively searching as part of the number.

And the really surprising thing is that even the U6 is reaching record lows
[1]. If the current trends with unemployment continue we'll have the lowest
'real' unemployment rate since the U6 started being recorded, 24 years ago.
The one 'zinger' I'd add here is that even the U6 does not account for
underemployment. Many of the jobs created in recent years have been McJobs and
if somebody has e.g. a STEM degree and is serving coffee, then they should
probably count as unemployed. Perhaps it's time for a U7. On the other hand, I
do not think this would meaningfully change the numbers.

I still do think automation is going to be disruptive since I simply don't see
how transportation automation, which is an enormous industry that offers
relatively good wages, can end up otherwise. But I've also become less cynical
since we've undoubtedly been sending productivity up, and even with the
outsourcing of desirable jobs or bringing in workers to fill those roles
domestically for lower wages, our economy seems to be doing phenomenally. And
that's something I certainly would not have predicted.

[1] -
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/u6rate](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/u6rate)

~~~
ryandrake
It’s really hard to measure underemployment. I mean, I have what most would
consider a pretty decent tech job, however many of my peers are Senior
Director of this and VP of that, and with my background and experience I know
I could be a CTO rather than what I am. Am I underemployed? I feel
underemployed, but who’s to say I am or am not?

~~~
PeterisP
A commonly used measure of underemployment is 'years of education not needed
for this job'. In this measure, if you'd be qualified to be a CTO but are not,
this doesn't count as underemployment, neither does the difference between a
junior engineer and a senior one, nor between a mcdonalds franchise manager
and mcdonalds CEO.

However, it does count going to a different/lower industry. A STEM grad in
McDonalds; a teacher in a cleaning job, etc; where you can clearly point
towards some 4 years spent on something that the current job doesn't need.

------
jeffreyrogers
The idea that rising disability is a cause of declining labor force
participation is interesting, and fits in with anecdotal data from what family
members in medicine have told me. They basically phrase it as: If you're
uneducated and poor, why would you work a low paying job with little hope of
advancement when you could go on disability and collect a similar amount of
money without working?

~~~
mywittyname
To be fair, many of these people are actually disabled. It's just that
previously they _could_ work. Like the article says, their managers cared
about them and and had the capacity to let them take lower-impact positions
that they were capable of doing.

We don't appreciate how difficult it can be to employ these marginally capable
workers. Keeping these people on staff at a small company raises health and
operational insurance costs pretty dramatically, so it can be hard to justify
keeping them on staff, even if you wanted to.

Disability is also pretty difficult to get, despite how the news makes it out
to be easy. My father had multiple heart attacks and cancer, and he's still
fighting to get on disability. And when he does, it will take years to come
into full-effect.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
I agree partly, but from what my family members have told me it seems that
some people are gaming the system for their own benefit. They've also told me
that people who truly would benefit from being on disability (like your
father) often have a hard time getting on it.

------
tobyjsullivan
Warning: the following is conjecture which I have not researched. Because who
has the time?

My main question while reading this article was why is the author so stuck on
"manufacturing" jobs being automated away? He does address this very briefly
in section III but I cannot help but feel his foundational research is highly
skewed.

Sure, robotics are growing in popularity and that technology, specifically,
will likely impact manufacturing. Comparatively speaking, however, industrial
robots are very expensive. Only the larger manufacturers are going to be
upgrading plants with multi-million dollar (or very, very recently hundreds of
thousands) equipment to replace a few hundred workers each (if that?).

Fun fact: ~90% of the 5.7 million companies in the US had fewer than 20
employees in 2012. 50% of working Americans were employed by companies of
fewer than 500 (source of questionable quality:
[https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-employment-by-firm-
siz...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-employment-by-firm-size-has-a-
fat-tailed-distribution-2015-6?r=US&IR=T)).

Compare all that to search results for "images of 1950s offices". You get
photos of rows and rows of desks of identical configurations - people with
paper pads, typewriters or tabulation machines. Look at what all these people
are doing. They are accounting departments calculating statements and balance
sheets by hand. They are typists writing out form letters one at a time. These
are the job categories that have been wiped out in their entirety by
spreadsheets and word processors that you can get literally for free. The CEO
can do the work of that 1950s accounting department by herself in an hour.

Where did those jobs go? I don't know how many there were to start but it
looks significant.

Yes, modern offices have the same configurations but it is fundamentally
different. The companies I work in can have an entire business unit (or
company!) working out of an office that size. One person at one desk is an
entire marketing department, the next person is HR (including
payroll/accounts/bookkeeping). The only rows of homogeneous roles you see
these days are the grunts building the technology.

In conclusion, I get the feeling a lot of people wondering if jobs are
disappearing seem to be suffering from a bit of "out of sight, out of mind".
Most of the automated jobs are already gone.

Just my thoughts.

~~~
zanny
This is why the post-recession employment recovery in the US is complete
fabrication. The jobs lost in 2008 were careers, the jobs that replaced them
were gig work like Uber. The employment figures today discount the tens of
millions of NEETs and the tens of millions of people trying to scrape by on
gig jobs that provide no healthcare, retirement, stability, and put them below
the poverty line.

Per-capita incomes are messed up because the top 1000 incomes inflate as much
as the bottom hundred million deflate.

> will likely impact manufacturing

Robotics have _been impacting manufacturing_ for decades. The death of office
jobs you mention was another casualty of automation we already felt. Nothing
about the impeding automation apocalypse is _coming up ahead_ because its
already happening. Its just the low hanging fruit _went_ first, and the tree
will keep being picked clean from bottom to top. The economy warps in response
to it, in a fleeting attempt to preserve outdated ideology, by fabricating
work and creating bullshit jobs out of bureaucracy and artificial complexity
to keep society from falling apart. The problem is every single private
enterprise resists giving people bullshit jobs to varying degrees, which
creates the discontent between workers who lose income over time and employers
who keep reaping larger and larger profits.

~~~
notabee
The increase in homeless encampments as detailed in this report are also a
stark indication of how false the recovery is. Unfortunately most of the
homeless get shipped to California, often with one way bus tickets from
municipalities that don't want to deal with the problem.
[https://www.nlchp.org/Tent_City_USA_2017](https://www.nlchp.org/Tent_City_USA_2017)
(Looks like they need to renew their TLS certificate.)

------
spyckie2
What do I know, I am not very good at this either and I respect the author's
willingness to get other people's perspectives and attempt to reach a
conclusion.

But I would like to critically consider the "indicative trends" mentality of
the author. Entities with ML algorithms that could replace jobs enmasse do not
yet exist, so past or current economic trends shouldn't indicate anything. ML
algorithms did not gradually takeover Go, for instance - the transition to AI
should neither be so gradual. Maybe if someone did micro-studies on Uber's
effect on Taxi drivers, it would server as a proxy but even Uber isn't a self
driving car company (yet).

That said, I really enjoyed reading about what is causing unemployment or the
loss of jobs. It's an interesting observation that disabilities is rising as
the reason for unemployment in the US. But again, attribution of these trends
is always difficult.

Anyways, thanks to the author for doing the explorative work.

~~~
lowbloodsugar
He touches on the idea of humans having the past laid out before them, with
the future to their backs. But then, as you say, fails to get to the
realization that paying attention to the present isn't going to give us any
predictions for how strong-AI, or even non-routine AI is going to change the
job prospects for humans. Robots are expensive, but servers aren't.

------
paulpauper
Regarding the horse example, there US horse population is 9 million. The
demand for horses never went away despite automation and has remained steady.
If one tried to extrapolate the early 20th century horse population trend to
the future, there should presently be no horses alive.

Although the labor force participation rate is falling, the total labor force
size has not (although it has flattened in recent years).

Rather than the total elimination of jobs, a more probable concern is the
bifurcation of the labor force by IQ, with those with an IQ below a certain
threshold barely getting by, stuck with low-paying jobs that barely pay ends
meet. Due to economic and technological factors, this IQ threshold will likely
gradually keep rising. [http://greyenlightenment.com/two-nations-within-a-
nation/](http://greyenlightenment.com/two-nations-within-a-nation/)

This is why the decline of manufacturing jobs has not hurt the overall labor
market size, because such semi-skilled, medium-IQ jobs are being replaced by
service sector jobs. However, the pay for these jobs is not as good.

Often what happens is the new technology will coexist with the older one, as
the bank teller example shows. Other times the implementation is so slow that
it is not a concern. I remember in 2007 McDonald's, Jack in the Box, and other
fast-food chains began to install self-order machines, but the adoption was
really slow, the machines were often broken, and the machines didn't replace
the role of the cooks and cashiers. People needed help using the machines,
necessitating staff. Same for those food store self-checkout machines. Rather
than the machines eliminating the cashiers, they coexist. Some people like
machines, but others don't. Machines break and someone has to supervise the
machines in case someone needs help or tries to fool the machine by imputing
the incorrect weight or item.

Overall, I am not too worried but I can see some cause for concern. Regarding
post-scarcity and UBI, entitlement spending has been on an unstoppable rise
for the past 50 years. We're already headed in that direction. SNAP, medicaid,
disability, and section 8 housing is pretty close to a UBI and post-scarcity.
The future is one where the government assumes a greater paternal role in
helping those who are unable to keep up with an increasingly competitive
economy.

~~~
SilasX
Right: like with horses[1], the problem isn't that humans will die out
entirely, but that only a tiny subset of them will "earn a keep" beyond
subsistence -- i.e. be able to sell labor whose market value is more than the
amount needed to keep them alive.

The only horses that stayed around were the ones that could perform a novelty
(racing/entertainment) or low-demand-niche role (short trips on rugged
terrain).

[1] A really, really underappreciated and overdismissed analogy.

------
ThomPete
One of the problems is that most jobs (95%) created from 2005 up until now are
temporary jobs[1]. That is in itself not necessarily a problem as it could
mean that people just become freelancers. But for the US it opens up for two
major issues.

1) Freelancers have to pay their healthcare themselves. 2) Most jobs created
are forced freelance contracts i.e. even if you work at an accounting company
they will try and put you on a freelance contract.

My personal belief is that while globalization is still growing we will not
see the underlying changes until it' too late. That's why I think all
governments should assume that most of their population will be without a job
sooner or later and plan accordingly.

[1] [https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-
created...](https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created-
since-2005-are-temporary/)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I wonder if that creates more volatility in the economy, business is much more
likely to reduce or end a freelancers hours than a full time employee in a
downturn.

------
habosa
[warning: unfinished thoughts]

On the far end of the "technological unemployment" worry spectrum are those
who really believe that AI techniques will yield robots that can do
essentially all human work better/faster/cheaper than a human could.

When discussing that possibility, I wonder if our current statistics and
vocabulary are really sufficient? After all when you talk about employment,
wages, productivity, etc we're thinking about governments and corporations. We
cannot forget that governments and corporations are human power structures and
one of the biggest forces pushing them forward is the desire of the rich and
powerful to become richer and more powerful.

If AI really begins to threaten the supremacy of its human masters, don't you
think those same masters will suppress the AI and try to keep the status quo?
After all a CEO with a billion dollars in the bank doesn't come to work just
to collect his/her paycheck, they come to work to be the boss.

Modern humans have been shown to be strongly, and possibly entirely, motivated
by relative wealth and power. The millionaire among billionaires feels poor,
the wage earner among the unemployed feels rich.

So maybe, however inefficient, we will continue to employ each other only
because it feels good for the employer to retain power over the employee?
Maybe we will reject a super-efficient robot-produced future because we don't
know how to form a society unless it's founded on a human power structure.
Maybe we'll find things for each other to do just so that we can make each
other do them.

I agree that if you enumerate all of my current material desires it's possible
that a future robot will be able to fulfill them. But I cannot anticipate the
societal evolution of desires and how much power over other people plays into
that.

~~~
vostrocity
I don't think many managers and executives enjoy their jobs because of the
power they have in the organization. I think they enjoy their jobs by being
proficient at their work and getting rewarded for it, like the rest of us.

------
IshKebab
Did he really show a graph of increasing employment in women, decreasing in
men, and then say "Let's ignore the women. Why on earth could male employment
be going down?"

Erm.... maybe because... women were taking their jobs?

~~~
PeterisP
Because in the period of interest (2005+) the female job participation rate
was declining as well; female employment reached the peak at around 2000.

------
crdoconnor
>The report linked above is from Ball State University, and argues that, while
manufacturing has thrived, automation has reduced the need for workers so much
that lots of them have been laid off:

>Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of
production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers.
Instead, we employed only 12.1 million.

>The report gets summarized in a few places as “13% of job loss is due to
trade, 87% is due to increasing productivity/automation”, which seems like a
fair summary of some of its claims.

It's a fair summary of Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara's _claims_ , but if
you take a closer look at the study's model, they conflate cost savings from
offshoring with cost savings from automation, which would naturally make job
losses from automation seem relatively larger.

They also lobby for a reduction in corporation tax on page 7.

------
crc32
Great article that seems to leave the question unresolved.

If technological unemployment is not a large factor; but inequality within
advanced economies is rising, then what other factors are at play? Are the
changes necessary to deal with those causes the same changes that would be
needed to deal with an all-knowing AI in 2150?

~~~
adynatos
inequality is rising because some people are simply more skilled than others.

~~~
_delirium
More data supports the hypothesis that inequality is rising because some
people _have more money_ than others, and currently it's easier to earn
significant returns from capital than from labor. Of course, not everyone
agrees, but Piketty et al have some evidence for the hypothesis. Is there
anyone with data-driven support for the claim that changes in overall
inequality are primarily driven by divergence in high-skill vs. low-skill
labor incomes? To be clear, I obviously know there _is_ a difference in high-
skill vs. low-skill labor incomes, but it's not clear its magnitude is enough
to account for the changes seen in macro-scale indicators like the Gini index.

~~~
edanm
Interesting question.

I'm not sure, but there have been a lot of economists who disagree with
Piketty and written about where he goes wrong. I assume that this implicitly
proves the other direction, that capital growth isn't larger than wage growth,
or whatever, so it might be a good idea to look there.

------
Eridrus
So, one issue I had with this is that a big part of the argument is that "when
I see shocks to employment, I don't see shocks to LFPR", but we do definitely
see shocks in unemployment rates, and I don't think it's crazy to think that
these shocks to employment may transfer to LFPR over long periods of time as
different people face different levels of success finding adequate work.

I think the strongest argument we can make is that whatever is going on with
LFPR has been going on for 50 years, and it does seem to indicate a more
difficult job market where people are finding that the jobs available are not
better than the alternative.

------
paulsutter
He may be misreading stagnant productivity growth.

Manufacturing productivity is measured in dollars[2], and prices of
manufactured goods have been going down[1] (largely from China competition):

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-in-
consumer...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-in-consumer-
goods-and-services-in-the-usa-1997-2017)

[2]
[https://www.bls.gov/lpc/faqs.htm#P03](https://www.bls.gov/lpc/faqs.htm#P03)

------
TheLostOne
We have three sectors, agriculture, industry and service.

Technology has replaced people in agriculture, at the same time industry jobs
exploded. Most people were shifted.

Technology has replace people in industry, but there were services to provide
- lower paying - jobs. Most people were shifted.

Now technology replaces jobs in services. There is no "next" sector.

------
bsbechtel
Employment is only a result of an individual wanting someone else to do
something for them, because they don't have the time or skill to do it
themselves. In exchange for someone doing this thing for them, they compensate
them with something of value, normally payment in the form of currency. When
you consider employment from this angle, I find it extremely hard to believe
that a day will come where the majority of humans on this planet won't want
help from other humans to accomplish their goals as they go about their daily
lives. Yes, employment in the form of large corporations giving out biweekly
paychecks may not exist anymore, but employment as a way to help your fellow
human will never cease to exist.

~~~
lmm
> I find it extremely hard to believe that a day will come where the majority
> of humans on this planet won't want help from other humans to accomplish
> their goals as they go about their daily lives.

If robots are better at helping people accomplish those goals then why would
people ask other humans for help rather than robots? I already choose to book
my holidays with machine rather than human assistance, pay for my groceries
via machine rather than human.... For the moment I pay humans to do some
things (cleaning, food preparation, art production, ...), but it seems
entirely conceivable that machines could get better at all of those as well.

~~~
crdoconnor
>I already choose to book my holidays with machine rather than human
assistance, pay for my groceries via machine rather than human

It's funny you should mention this. My last job was at an OTA (online travel
agent). They started out with a website to book holidays and an intent to
streamline the crap out of the process catering to individuals like yourself.
They hired a skeleton call center staff to deal with unforeseen problems with
an intent to rely upon them as little as possible.

Over time they realized that a lot of people were calling up to do bits and
pieces of the booking over the phone that they could have done online.

Initially they tried to steer them back to the website but they realized that
they were mostly dropping out of the sales funnel.

It turned out a lot of people actually wanted to talk to a _human_ when
spending $1,500 on a holiday. Shocker.

So, they changed tack and ramped up call center staffing, advertised a free
phone number on the every page and let people essentially decide themselves
where in the sales funnel they wanted to talk to a human - the whole way
through or, like you, not at all.

This company had a really smart approach in other areas too about when to use
automation and when not to.

>For the moment I pay humans to do some things like cleaning

You say that as if there has been a multitude of advances in home cleaning
technology since the 1950s. I'm skeptical of the notion that Roombas took
anybody's job or that I'm about to get a toilet cleaning robot any time soon.

~~~
lmm
> It turned out a lot of people actually wanted to talk to a human when
> spending $1,500 on a holiday. Shocker.

I'm surprised, and I wonder what the age breakdown of those people looks like.

> I'm skeptical of the notion that Roombas took anybody's job

It must have on the margin, surely? I was on the fence about getting a cleaner
for a long time; it wouldn't've taken much to push me into not doing so (and
many of my friends in similar circumstances, some of whom have Roombas,
don't).

> or that I'm about to get a toilet cleaning robot any time soon.

Toilet cleaning will probably be one of the last things to go as the worst-
case scenario there is pretty bad, but I read some interesting blog posts a
year or two back about a robot that can pick up clothes from the floor and run
a laundry cycle (with the help of a QR code sticker on the washer). I don't
expect a robot to replace a human cleaner immediately, but I do expect the
gradual automation of more and more domestic cleaning tasks, which will push
more and more people across the line where it doesn't make sense to hire a
human cleaner.

~~~
crdoconnor
>I wonder what the age breakdown

Skewed, but not skewed towards the elderly nearly as much as you clearly think
it was.

Not everybody is like us.

>It must have on the margin, surely?

Not necessarily. It might just mean that, on balance, people who were never
going to employ a maid in the first place live in slightly less filthy houses.

>Toilet cleaning will probably be one of the last things to go as the worst-
case scenario there is pretty bad

I can't actually see any evidence that anybody's even trying. It's not like
driverless cars where we're being told every year that they're, like, 5 years
away tops. Who is even working on this? As far as I can tell, nobody.

~~~
lmm
> Not necessarily. It might just mean that, on balance, people who were never
> going to employ a maid in the first place live in slightly less filthy
> houses.

But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ
a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like
anything else, with lots of people on the margin (and I'm pretty sure I was
one of them), and the introduction of the Roomba shifts where that line is
slightly.

> I can't actually see any evidence that anybody's even trying. It's not like
> driverless cars where we're being told every year that they're, like, 5
> years away tops. Who is even working on this? As far as I can tell, nobody.

I'm not aware of anyone working on toilets, but I think that's the highest
hanging fruit. You already mentioned Roombas, and I mentioned LaundryBot or
whatever it's called; I'd expect us to progress gradually from there to things
like dusting, window cleaning, oven cleaning and toilets in that order or
close to it.

~~~
crdoconnor
>But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to
employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve
like anything else

Even if it was a bell curve (and I see no reason why reality ought to be that
neat), there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner
houses rather than fewer maids.

> You already mentioned Roombas, and I mentioned LaundryBot

Roombas are singularly unimpressive as a means of cleaning your house (I know
of nobody who actually owns one, and the reviews on amazon are... only really
impressiveif you are without stairs and have a pet hair problem). Googling
laundrybot gives me some japanese thing invented in 2015 that costs $280,000
and, product-wise, doesn't seem to have gone anywhere since then.

It's almost as if the automation hype isn't matching reality.

I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years time nothing has really changed in this
space either. Roombas came out in 2002 - 16 years ago. Significant potential
I'll be dead by the time a robot that can clean my toilet exists and I'm not
exactly old.

~~~
lmm
> there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses
> rather than fewer maids.

If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how dirty
their house is (and how could it not be?) then the two are equivalent. The
only way roombas could _not_ be putting people out of work on the margin is if
there's some sort of mysterious discontinuity, and why would we assume such a
thing?

~~~
crdoconnor
>If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how
dirty their house is (and how could it not be?)

Because:

a) lots and lots and lots of people clean their own house and maybe they're
the ones buying the vast majority of the roombas, not people with maids.

b) just because your roomba cleans up your pet hair really well upstairs
doesn't necessarily mean you will want your cleaner to stop coming on
tuesdays.

c) tolerance for dirt to me seems like a textbook example of something that
has a high demand elasticity

~~~
lmm
> lots and lots and lots of people clean their own house and maybe they're the
> ones buying the vast majority of the roombas, not people with maids

Surely the one substitutes for the other. The thought "I'm spending longer
than I want to cleaning, and my house still isn't as clean as I'd like, and
I've had more money lately, I can afford to..." could be completed "hire a
cleaner" or "buy a roomba".

> tolerance for dirt to me seems like a textbook example of something that has
> a high demand elasticity

What do you mean? Different people will have their threshold in different
places, certainly, and the amount they're willing to pay will vary, but I
don't see how that changes anything.

I'm generally struggling to understand what your model is here. Are you saying
people make the decision about whether to hire a cleaner when they're born and
then never change it?

~~~
crdoconnor
>Surely the one substitutes for the other.

If a roomba approximated a maid, perhaps. It very much does _not_.

>I'm generally struggling to understand what your model is here. Are you
saying people make the decision about whether to hire a cleaner when they're
born and then never change it?

No, I'm saying that:

A) building a neoclassical economic model on this _at all_ is pointless
because of the assumptions you'd have to make. You've just tried to make about
four assumptions in order to build your model and they weren't just poor
assumptions, they were cringeworthy assumptions.

B) the total number of people who actually own roombas or roomba like devices
suggests to me that the effect on cleaner employment is likely, in any case,
to be < noise.

~~~
lmm
> If a roomba approximated a maid, perhaps. It very much does not.

It fulfils some of the same functions, some of what some buyers are buying
for. A milkshake is not a close approximation to a muffin, but McDonalds found
that they did substitute for each other in terms of what people bought for
breakfast.

> A) building a neoclassical economic model on this at all is pointless
> because of the assumptions you'd have to make. You've just tried to make
> about four assumptions in order to build your model and they weren't just
> poor assumptions, they were cringeworthy assumptions.

You're essentially saying "give up trying to understand the world", to which I
can only respond "no" (compare the opening quote on
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/24/probabilities-
without-m...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/24/probabilities-without-
models/) ). I think all the assumptions I gave were true and reasonable; if
you can actually make a case for why any of them is wrong I will listen, but
just dismissing them is not constructive.

~~~
crdoconnor
>A milkshake is not a close approximation to a muffin

I would say it is. They have similar calorific content, they are similarly
portable and they are similarly stuffed full of sugar.

>You're essentially saying "give up trying to understand the world"

...and now you're using a cringeworthy straw man.

I'm saying "if you're going to make a claim like "roombas are killing jobs",
it probably shouldn't be based on a model that makes 4 _really_ reaching
assumptions, each of which are completely unproven and quite likely wrong.

Oh, but the New York Times and a few economists thinks robot kills jobs, so
this fits in with everybody's groupthink, so that's ok, right?

>I think all the assumptions I gave were true and reasonable; if you can
actually make a case for why any of them is wrong

This is reminding me of the conversation I had with my vicar who asked me to
disprove god's existence if I thought I was so smart.

>just dismissing them is not constructive.

I disagree. I think it's _very_ constructive to dismiss unproven assumptions
that are probably wrong, but neatly fit into some kind of groupthink. It's how
a lot of science is advanced.

~~~
lmm
> I would say it is. They have similar calorific content, they are similarly
> portable and they are similarly stuffed full of sugar.

Exactly - they're superficially very different, but what they provide to the
buyer is very similar. Just as with Roombas and cleaners.

> it probably shouldn't be based on a model that makes 4 really reaching
> assumptions, each of which are completely unproven and quite likely wrong

So put up or shut up: which assumption do you think is wrong, and what do you
think the appropriate replacement is?

> This is reminding me of the conversation I had with my vicar who asked me to
> disprove god's existence if I thought I was so smart.

It's reminding me of the tortoise who denies modus ponens - if you deny the
ability to make inferences then where do we even go from there?

> I disagree. I think it's very constructive to dismiss unproven assumptions
> that are probably wrong, but neatly fit into some kind of groupthink. It's
> how a lot of science is advanced.

Saying "groupthink" as a meaningless buzzword isn't constructive either.
Science advances by questioning assumptions but you have to actually do the
work of considering an alternative; science doesn't advance by people
introducing a question like "but what if effects didn't follow causes" and
then just stopping there.

~~~
crdoconnor
>what they provide to the buyer is very similar. Just as with Roombas and
cleaners.

Roombas do not deep clean carpets, cannot traverse stairs, can't clean
bathrooms _at all_ , are blocked by clothing and other heavy objects, closed
doors, etc. and cannot clean anything that is not on a floor.

That is not what I would qualify as "similar to a person".

>So put up or shut up

Why? I am not the one trying to advance an agenda of "roombas are clearly
putting maids out of business". I'm the skeptic.

I think it's entirely possible that _all_ of your assumptions are wrong and
probable that at least half of them are.

>if you deny the ability to make inferences then where do we even go from
there?

I might start with questionnaires asking roomba owners about their cleaner
hiring practices in order to confirm or deny one of the key assumptions
underpinning your thesis. It'd be a good topic for research, but not one I
have seen pursued.

>Saying "groupthink" as a meaningless buzzword

It is not a meaningless buzzword. The idea that robots destroy jobs is
commonly accepted because it is popular. I could find 20 or so articles in a
couple of minutes advancing the idea, whereas the skeptic's view - that it
doesn't, is barely represented in the media.

Most of what appears in the media advancing this agenda is unsourced and the
little that is sourced comes from things like that junk study from Ball State
U.

I mean, does that not sound like groupthink to you? It does to me.

>Science advances by questioning assumptions but you have to actually do the
work of considering an alternative

Well, if you're really interested in proving your point - why not fire off
some questionnaires to roomba owners - did they have a cleaner before they
bought the roomba? did they fire the cleaner after? did they cut the cleaner's
hours? This seems like a more productive line of enquiry - reality is usually
more accurate than shit models.

------
lukeschlather
This reminds me of the old joke that GDP goes down when a man marries his
maid. But this article manages to not only make that error, but ignore how
clearly the data suggest that there are a fair number of men who are
housekeepers and are going off the labor market for similar reasons.

------
neilwilson
Come back when the retirement age drops below 50.

At the moment it is going the other way.

------
onion2k
The difference I see is that historically automation was used to increase
productivity. I don't see that in the current wave of "AI"-based automation.
There's an emphasis on speed, accuracy, and working with more unknowns, but
there isn't any talk of getting more work done. That makes it scary.

~~~
abusoufiyan
>The difference I see is that historically automation was used to increase
productivity.

Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that
it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were
doing for less money than a human salary.

I guess I also just don't see much difference. All that will happen will be
again a shift away from many kinds of jobs (the easily automatible ones) to
different kinds.

I mean, there are all kinds of jobs now that didn't exist 50 years ago
(software engineer, social media manager, influencer, etc. etc.)

~~~
jdietrich
>Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that
it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were
doing for less money than a human salary.

Mechanisation of the textile industry led to vast increases in the quantity of
production. Prior to the industrial revolution, most peasants would have owned
only one set of clothes and replaced them only when they were entirely beyond
repair. Cheap cloth created demand for wardrobes and dressers, because a lot
of people were now in the peculiar position of owning more clothes than they
could wear at once.

The luddites were ultimately wrong because of Jevons paradox - labour
efficiencies in the textile industry vastly increased the demand for their
product, and with it their demand for labour. Hand-loom weavers didn't lose
their livelihoods to the power loom, they just made ten times as much cloth
for twice the wage.

Automation and mechanisation in other manufacturing sectors likewise
stimulated vastly increased consumer demand, contributing to a virtuous cycle
of increasing profit, wages and living standards. Over the course of the 19th
and 20th centuries, the efficiencies of mass-manufacturing gave ordinary
people secure employment and access to a dizzying array of consumer goods. The
more stuff we made, the more stuff we could afford to buy.

I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern. A lot of tech-heavy businesses
seem to be startlingly close to zero-sum. Uber has decimated the taxi
industry, but it doesn't seem to have vastly increased overall ridership - the
most generous figures I've seen suggest perhaps a 40% increase in some
markets. Google and Facebook have become multi-billion dollar companies
through advertising revenue, but the overall growth of ad spending across all
media has barely outpaced inflation, with the newspaper industry being the
most obvious casualty. I can't think of many major tech companies that didn't
kill an industry.

I'd love to be proven wrong.

~~~
abusoufiyan
>I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern.

AI/ML which can mine through sports footage to create highlight reels and
funny clip collections, etc will create tons of consumer goods (videos) which
can all be monetized on Youtube. Just one example.

How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite a
lot more people to watch movies and tv than before.

Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good
last holiday season.

~~~
kradeelav
> How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite
> a lot more people to watch movies and tv than before.

... and the word 'cable cutters' is being thrown around with a lot more
intensity, plus various charts of rapidly declining cable TV viewership.

> Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good
> last holiday season.

[gestures at the latest brick-and-mortar bookstore news with B+N on the rocks
and Borders in its grave ... given AMZ got it's start as a bookseller.]

A pessimistic response to be sure (and one that I'm reluctantly making), but
there's coincidence, and then there's a pattern that starts emerging whenever
a disruptor unicorn cements its place into an industry.

------
ageofwant
I do not want to be employed. I want to do with my time what I want, and when
I want. I do not want to continue living in the age of want, I want to live in
the age of plenty. I think it's fair to assume this wish is pretty universal.

So I do not give a rats arse about 'productivity', and neither does anybody
else, what we want is to live in paradise, today.

Paradise, for me, is when I can have all of the below as a matter of basic
human convenience, 'free' as we call it now in the age of want:

* min 4000 calories of excellent and varied nutritious food whenever I want it

* 1kl of 60℃ water / day to my exclusive disposal, I will generally lie around in it

* 1l of alcoholic beverage, typically high hopped beer, I'm not fussy

* sex on demand with a like minded individual, I'm not fussy, hotness would be nice but I'll be happy with someone less ugly than me

* I want to be able travel to any place in the solar system that humans have built homesteads, on demand, by getting on the nearest bus to Titan

* I want to live as long as I please, in excellent health until life literally bores me to death and I decide to die of some ancient crippling disease as an expression of art, or some other bullshit like that.

Now, if I can have the above, you may own all the AI and tech you want, no
worries.

