
Are global wages about to turn? - SimplyUseless
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34488950
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alexhu11
The elephant in the room I don't hear people discussing is the impending
spectre of deflation. If the labor supply diminishes what happens to aggregate
demand? Judging from the example of Japan, demands implodes as fewer people
buy goods and services because they aren't working! This deflates the currency
and pushes the economy in recession.

Most of the developed world is sloughing off huge portions of its working
populations. For example, Italy is set to halve its workforce in the next
decade. There are huge economic, social, and political ramifications.

~~~
InclinedPlane
All the more hilarious in the context of the "immigrants are stealing our
jobs" narrative that has always been popular.

~~~
function_seven
Well, yeah. If jobs are cut in half, and the immigrants steal the other half,
then were are you?

(I'm not seriously making this statement, but "they" are)

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hwstar
I have to disagree about the demographics. The job market will not improve. It
will continue to deteriorate.

China may have a growing middle class, but there are over 1 billion people in
India and 1.1 billion people in Africa which have yet to be brought into the
middle class, and companies will take advantage of this army of reserve
labour.

By the time these countries have been exploited, then robotics will have taken
over and most everyone will be unemployed.

Once fully automated, are the owners of the robots going to be even richer
than today, and the rest of the world population left to live in misery, or
will there be a revolution (peaceful or violent) which forces redistribution?

~~~
cpursley
> By the time these countries have been exploited.

While I agree with many of your points, and certainly there are many people
who get exploited. But overall, if employers and employees are agreeing to
mutual employment terms without coercion, then by definition it is not
exploitation.

Additionally, things robotics and 3D printing are different than events like
the industrial revolution which a large amount of capital was required. The
owners of robotics and computing will be much more distributed and require
less capital.

Brining people into the middle class with the modern infrastructure and
stability that comes with is a really great thing. Robotics will only augment
the quality of life for these people, freeing up massive amounts of human
potential.

~~~
cpursley
The example I like is the farming revolution. There was a point when only 97%
of people worked on farms. Now that's flipped. Only 3% of people work on
farms. Are those 97% without jobs and nothing to do? No, of course not. The
economy expanded and new industries emerged that nobody expected. The
(farming) machines unlocked massive amounts of human potential. I don't expect
the robotic/software/3D revolution to be any different. I'm pretty optimistic
about what's coming.

~~~
wstrange
Previous innovations have essentially automated human (or animal) muscle
power. A tractor is vastly more powerful than a horse.

AI (or whatever you want to call it), is coming - perhaps not as fast as its
proponents would like, but I think we can agree it will happen.

This is the first technology that automates the power of the human mind.

The range of jobs that _can 't_ be done by a machine is going to get
increasingly narrow

~~~
Futurebot
Right. Part of what's missed is that we don't need great GAI to get rid of
lots of jobs; weak "AI" / deep learning / related automation techniques get us
a long way there. We have existing examples in law document review, article
topic summarization, etc.

Another thing which is often missed is how complementarity may play out for
certain jobs: it's NOT going to necessarily be "program / robot replaces every
job X", but instead "program / robot allows one person to do the job
previously done by 50." You can still have massive unemployment without
getting rid of every worker doing a certain job (and their job may change more
to be a machine guide / manager / error corrector.)

An example I see all the time now is in supermarkets. You have self-checkout
lanes that are overseen by one person. It used to be 5 lanes staffed by
people. Now you only need one to intervene when something goes wrong. 5
workers have become 1 without eliminating the job "register person"
completely. Instead, they've changed into "auto register checkout manager"
while everyone else got the ax.

~~~
zanny
And on the topic of register checkout manager, you can easily see the natural
progression towards the elimination of the profession entirely.

The registers get more self sufficient as the software matures. The security
systems become cheaper and more accurate to eliminate the lackluster security
effect a clerk has standing there. The clerk is removed entirely. Then the
shelf stocking is automated with computer vision and maybe magnetized sticker
guide rails in the floors.

And then people realize its stupid to go to a store to buy stuff when you can
virtually tour a mall of everything and have whatever you want shipped to you.
You order it, it goes through computers without ever interacting with a
person, and a manufacturer ships you it instantly.

And that process gets automated too. The transport goes from self driving
autos transporting your goods using standardized automated transfer mechanisms
to your automated mailbox to a fabricator in your own home that comes from
Star Trek.

None of that (besides the fabricator part at the end, thats going a bit heavy)
is nothing novel or even new. It exists. It just takes market pressure and
time to make it economical to implement and for culture to accept it. Because
it _is_ more efficient, and it _will_ inevitably happen because its better in
every way except the "but people aren't doing it!" angle. It does not take AI
sentience to move boxes or see dirt on a floor through dictionary lookup and
fuzzy logic processing.

~~~
Futurebot
In the developed world, I think we'll be seeing the hybrid approach for the
next few decades at least, but yes, we will get past that to your fully
automated vision. Also, the non-evenly distributed future effect means we'll
likely see that vision in SF in, let's say, 2100, but won't see it in Flint,
MI until 2150. It is coming, though.

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csense
> The global population grew at a rate of almost 2% a year throughout the
> 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s. That slowed to a rate of between
> 1% and 1.5% a year in the 1990s and 2000s and that rate of change is now
> forecast to fall relatively quickly...The working-age share rose strongly
> for the 40 years to 2012...An ONS report of 2014 found that UK real wages in
> the 1970s and 1980s grew by an average of 2.9% a year. That fell to 1.5% in
> the 1990s, and 1.2% between 2000 and 2010...

According to the article's own data, rising real wages have occurred during a
time of increasing population and an increasing share of the population being
working-age, and slowed as population growth slowed. But the article goes on
to argue

> A smaller workforce though should raise demand for workers

but doesn't this contradict the very evidence cited in the article?

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konschubert
I see two ways how wages can grow: More wealth is generated (per time) or
income is redistributed to the working population.

I don't see how any of these follow from the observations noted in the
article.

~~~
betaby
You don't own that non-robotic/robotic factory - only sub-percent of the
population does, neither you can tax them properly - tax 'optimization'. Thus
redistribution is not happening today and there is not going to happen. Most
of today's redistribution is from earners income tax, not from business. And
less workers means less people from whom to redistribute.

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mjevans
How about the impact of automation on jobs. Will this finally mean that we
have robots perform more of the drudgery work? Maybe a return to artisans
lovingly crafting luxury goods?

~~~
hugh4
You can already get lovingly handcrafted luxury goods if you want them.
They're expensive, and they're not going to get cheaper.

If I need a new wallet I can buy a cheap one which was mass-produced in a
factory for ten bucks, or I can buy a nice one which was _also_ mass-produced
in a factory for two hundred bucks, but if I want one that was lovingly hand-
crafted by an artisan over a period of a week and a half I've gotta pay a week
and a half's skilled wages, and there aren't that many people with the money
and the desire to surround themselves with pointless proof-of-work.

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Swizec
Does this mean that there are less people competing for jobs every year and we
should negotiate accordingly?

What are the implications on job hopping? In theory my market value should go
up every year even if all other factors remain constant.

~~~
Futurebot
If one is in a non-routine job that requires creativity, the human touch,
synthesizing (currently) difficult concepts together, etc. then the job market
is going to be great for a while. Software developers (particularly, as
several recent papers indicate) with great communication skills and high
emotional intelligence, "designers" (used very broadly - could be anything
from art design to system design), marketers, artists of various kinds (though
this will be subject to the superstar effect), politicians, certain kinds of
teachers (I'm including everything from the creators of tutorials to Sal Khan-
types) and various types of business owners/managers will be in good shape for
a while. Anyone in these categories willing to become non-stop learn-for-
lifers ([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-
relevant-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-in-
a-career-workers-train-nonstop.html)) will likely be OK. So yes, your
negotiating position may actually improve a great deal.

If one is in an a "routine" job (as defined by Autor), one should be thinking
very carefully about the next few decades. Upskilling, becoming autodidacts,
and most importantly agitating for political change will be things that this
group needs to engage in (the former two to stay relevant; the latter to keep
eating.)

