
Not a Luddite fallacy (2011) - cwb
http://baatz.io/posts/not-a-luddite-fallacy/
======
larsiusprime
Required reading anytime someone invokes the word "Luddite":
[http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-
Industrial/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-
Industrial/dp/0201407183)

Enclosure
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure))
is suspiciously never mentioned whenever the Luddites are invoked. It's not as
simple as "technology took muh job, rar!" \-- it's more like "hey, this common
land that used to belong to all of us has been forcibly taken away and given
to this guy with a factory who now gets to be super productive and take away
our livelihoods, but he doesn't have to share any of the increased wealth he
now enjoys."

Technology undoubtedly increases productivity and wealth. The question is, WHO
gets to own that wealth and what gives them a right to it.

~~~
arethuza
Good point - here in Scotland there were the Clearances in the 18th and 19th
centuries forcing peoples off lands - either to the cities or to emigrate or
to simply starve:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances)

There is a lot of very murky history to land ownership in Scotland - one of
the reasons I'm so pleased with the "right to roam" that we have now as well
as Scottish Government policies favouring community land ownership.

~~~
Sulfolobus
If you haven't already read it I highly recommend "The Poor Had No Lawyers" by
Andy Wightman [1]. It can be a struggle to convince people to read a book on
the history of Scots property law but it is a really fantastic book. Manages
to balance detail without ending up stultified and provides a lot of context
behind the current state of land reform in Scotland.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Poor-Had-No-
Lawyers/dp/178027114...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Poor-Had-No-
Lawyers/dp/178027114X/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8)

------
arrrg
The generalized version of the fallacy (“Labour-saving technologies increase
unemployment _in general_ by reducing demand for labour _in general_.”) may be
wrong or not. That’s kind of hard to figure out.

However, the micro level version of the fallacy is, I think, not a fallacy at
all, but very much true and can be disastrous for a great many individuals:
“Labour-saving technologies increase unemployment _among people with my
qualifications_ by reducing demand for labour _for people with my
qualifications_.” (The consequence may not be unemployment. The affected
people more or less only qualify for jobs where no qualifications are
necessary, probably leading to unemployment for some, a reduction in income
for others.)

Put another way, while the labour market in general may be left intact, the
effect on specific individuals may be disastrous. In that context luddites
smashing up machines may be entirely rational for them personally, because
even though the industrial revolution lifted large swathes of humanity out of
poverty (eventually), along the way many individuals had to suffer greatly and
it didn’t get better for them personally until they died. Maybe it got better
for their kids or grandkids.

That’s one reason why thinking about macro level effects is not enough (but
there may also be better solutions than smashing up machines, i.e. it may well
be possible to get the positive macro level effects over longer time scales
while also, through other means, reducing or eliminating poverty or suffering
on a micro level).

~~~
cwb
You're right, the micro-level version isn't a fallacy (either..), though I
think that's less contentious, or? Many countries already have some experience
with this. For example, agriculture has gone from having 70-80% of the workers
in 1870 to less than 2% in 2008
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_States#Employment)).
Some countries now have welfare systems that introduce some security on an
individual level, though in their current form they tend to rely on the
_average_ employment rate remaining fairly high.

------
mcv
It's not clear why the author thinks it's not a fallacy.

What bothers me about this sort of discussion, though, is the assumption that
we need to work. I want technology to do my job for me, so I can focus on fun
stuff. But for that to work, we should change our economic system so we don't
need to work, or at least not as much.

What technology has really done, is not so much take away people's jobs, but
make capital investment an increasingly large part of productivity, leading
all the profits of this increased productivity to end up with the small elite
that controls the capital. Look at how much wealth inequality has grown over
the past 100 years, particularly in the US.

Keynes predicted in the 1930s that due to increased productivity, we'd all
have to work a lot less than we're currently doing. He's wrong because the
benefits of our increased productivity are not distributed equally.

In short: we need a basic income. Or something else to ensure that everybody
benefits from this.

~~~
cwb
Sorry I couldn't make it more clear. Was there anything particular that you
didn't understand?

Agree on the basic income (in general, I'm not sure about the details). Jobs
so far have been a convenient and pragmatic (not necessarily fair) way to both
create and distribute wealth. At the same time, we should note that popular
alternatives like communism or socialism have failed rather badly.

------
mcguire
" _I hope I have been able to convince you that the Luddite fallacy is not a
fallacy and that this will have significant economic and social implications._
"

I'm sorry, did you actually make an argument? All I could find was some un-
supported assertions.

~~~
cwb
No, not for it having significant economic and social implications, that's
more a corollary of employment rate decreasing -- I'll change that sentence.
The argument for the Luddite fallacy not being a fallacy was that humans have
so far been able to compete with technology, but that we're fast losing that
edge and when that happens things really are different this time. Does that
make sense?

~~~
marcosdumay
That's an assertion, not an argument. The article also does not support it in
any way (what would turn it into an argument). Thus, I'll have to agree with
the GP, in that it is an unsupported assertion.

It's an assertion that I happen to agree with, but not because of this
article.

~~~
cwb
Perhaps, I might be missing something. The way I understand it is that "the
Luddite fallacy is not a fallacy" is an assertion (OED: "a confident and
forceful statement of fact or belief"). The reason, I claim, is that humans
will not be able to compete with robots for much longer (in large numbers)
which means unemployment is likely to go up (I understand that that's not a
strict implication since governments could ban robots). The reason humans
won't be able to compete with robots is that technology is gaining more and
more of the abilities that humans use in their jobs (like reasoning and visual
recognition). Those reasons consists of (a set of) assertions that could be
wrong, but they are reasons and an argument is (OED again) "a reason or set of
reasons given in support of an idea, action or theory". Thus, I thought that
what I did qualified as an argument, or am I mistaken?

In any case, if you agree with the assertion, what would be your argument for
it?

~~~
mcguire
" _...that humans will not be able to compete with robots for much longer..._
"

Do you have any convincing reasons to believe that?

~~~
cwb
You might not find them convincing, but the reasons I believe that is the case
are:

\- Human hardware is fairly fixed (unless we go the cyborg route) whereas
robot hardware (at least the computation part) evolves roughy exponentially
and I don't see reasons for that to stop.

\- As robot behaviour evolves (whether through deliberate design, genetic
algorithms, or other types of learning) improvements can be replicated quickly
and approximately for free. Improvements to human behaviours is notoriously
hard, expensive, and time-consuming to replicate.

\- We can rewrite many of our wealth creation recipes to make use of more
specialised robots instead of flexible humans, which means robots won't need
to get close to general AI before this has significant effects on jobs.

\- We are starting to see robots perform the most sophisticated human skills:
visual recognition, acting on and producing language, and decision making
under uncertainty. Granted, robots don't do most of these things very well yet
compared with humans, but I don't see fundamental reasons for why the
development will stop short of human abilities.

\- Robots can work 24/7, won't go on vacation, won't quit on you, don't play
political games with the other robots, won't sue you, don't require food and
bathrooms, and they'll make fewer mistakes.

\- If you're mostly questioning the timing, I don't have a particularly good
answer, but given how I understand the state of things I believe we're talking
low single-digit decades rather than centuries for a significant proportion of
people to look around and not find a job they could do better than a robot for
a liveable wage (without government subsidies). If you disagree on the
timescale I think we'd need to have a detailed discussion about how we
understand technological developments and the jobs people do. You may well be
able to convince me that I'm off on the timing.

------
fredkbloggs
Let's suppose for a moment that we accept the thesis that due to automation,
there won't be much work for humans in the future.

Instead of taking wealth from the smaller number of humans who are creating
that wealth and giving it to those who are not, why don't we just accept that
we don't need so many of us any more? Let the extras die off naturally (note
to angry skimmers: I SAID NATURALLY) and migrate to a new lower-population
equilibrium. There have been a lot of explanations offered for why the world's
more advanced economies have been seeing lower birth rates for decades, but
one rarely reads the most obvious one: people are having fewer children
because fewer humans are needed. This isn't a problem to be solved, it's a
boon to future generations.

While some resources are created through economic activity driven by humans,
others (most notably land, in the form of space between neighbors who desire
it, frontiers, the economic viability of wilderness conservation, and of
course land for economic purposes) are fixed. If fewer humans can create just
as much of the variable stuff while leaving more of the fixed stuff for each
one, how is that not better for all? The vast majority of humans, if not
literally every last one, will be much wealthier. And that's even before we
consider the fundamental unfairness of redistribution, or the waste associated
with the political and bureaucratic machines it entails.

Instead of thinking about how to redistribute the dividends from automation,
we should be making sure we won't have to. In a given environment, every
species has an optimal population. If we alter our environment such that fewer
humans can produce the same amount of wealth as more humans, that optimal
population has decreased. We need to accept that and adjust to it, not fight
it with gimmickry and theft. If (and it's a big if) automation is really going
to put billions of people out of productive work, then the only sustainable
answer to that is fewer people. Embrace it.

~~~
jal278
You're making an assumption that the purpose of humanity is to work to create
wealth. That's a very narrow view of our potential. Many would view human
flourishing more through the lens of creativity, relationships, and
_meaningful_ work (which may not be economically productive).

While I do believe that smaller populations may be more desirable, the logical
conclusion of your line of thinking would be that once we automate everything,
then humans should naturally bow out to their technological creations.

~~~
fredkbloggs
That assumes it's possible to automate everything that creates wealth (I'm
using "wealth" in the author's extremely broad sense; it does not mean
"money"). It sounds like you're saying it isn't, and I agree. That is, the
optimal human population will never be zero.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
"Optimal human population of zero" seems like a contradiction-in-terms. For
whom is it optimal to have a human population of zero? Surely not for the
humans, and since we're the ones who exist, we draw up the criteria.

~~~
fredkbloggs
> "Optimal human population of zero" seems like a contradiction-in-terms.

Well, I also noted that it wouldn't occur, so... ok?

> For whom is it optimal to have a human population of zero?

While this is moot given the above, the sad reality is "probably most species
other than humans". But that really wasn't the point here at all. Even if an
ecosystem is a zero-sum game and the success (or anything less than total
extinction) of humans means the failure of something else, that's not a reason
to voluntarily go extinct. Nor did I say otherwise. The point isn't there
should be zero humans but rather that there's probably a need for far fewer
than 8 billion, and that not only would every individual human be better off
if there were fewer, humanity as a whole would likely be better off, too. The
fact that most other species would have a much better chance of survival in a
world with a few million humans than with tens of billions is a great bonus,
and one that also adds value to those humans' lives, but was not really the
main point.

------
klez
On the same tone: "Humans need not apply"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

------
brightball
What I always wonder about with this formula is how many human jobs from the
US have been shipped overseas to other humans who cost less? Those jobs are
still being done by people, we just aren't cost competitive in labor for the
mass of unskilled job opportunities.

It seems like something like the Fair Tax, where legal citizens get a stipend
every month to offset the sales tax against basic needs, that came with a
slightly higher stipend to make it more like a basic income, would have the
net effect of make low cost labor more affordable and those jobs more viable.
It would basically have the effect of doubling minimum wage WITHOUT passing
the costs along to the businesses and making labor more expensive.

Just makes you wonder if we wouldn't be better off finding ways to repatriate
the jobs that exist than to worry about the ones that are continually more
automated.

~~~
relate
Except that increased money supply means inflation which means that middle &
upper class can buy less than before. E.g. someone with a medium salary might
only get 20% higher income post-stipend but prices would rise more.

~~~
brightball
Fair Tax eliminates the income tax though, which would take care of that
completely.

------
AnimalMuppet
I think the whole question shows that people are thinking wrong.

Think of a society/civilization _spending_ people. Oh, we can automate much of
agriculture? Great; we don't have to spend 90% of our people on growing food.
Now we can spend them on factory jobs, and our society becomes better off. Now
we don't have to spend so many people in factories? That's a good thing, too -
we can spend those people on more productive things. Again, our society will
become better off.

There are a couple of ways this could not work out, though. First, there is
the social unrest that can happen in the time of transition. Second, we can
lose one kind of jobs before we figure out what the new kind is, and so leave
a lot of people idle. Third, we could eventually create jobs that are beyond
our ability to train the bulk of people to be able to do them.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
But human idleness is the goal! Working, for most people, is a bunch of
miserable drudgery.

~~~
fastandfurryous
Profit maximization is the goal behind automation.

We'd need to see changes in human nature or society to ensure that misplaced
labor can still have a quality of life if idle, because profit optimization
says you won't see a cent if I don't have to give it to you.

------
joshuaheard
If automation is providing all your needs, you won't need a job.

[Edit] Spotted this after reading the article:

"Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of
data"

([http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-c...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-
created-more-jobs-than-destroyed-140-years-data-census)

~~~
pixl97
>"Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of
data"

"Past results are not indicative of future performance"

We can't compare the last 200 years of human to the past 20,000.

For example 66 million years ago the dinosaurs had already lived around 140
million years. In another million they would be dead because of exceptional
conditions. Everyday in which we live in modern society is an exception
condition based upon both the rate of change in human knowledge and rate of
change in the environment.

As to your first statement. If I own the machines why should I keep you, that
are now unnecessary, alive and instead live in super luxury with a few million
people on the planet.

------
Mithaldu
Oh no, the singularity is coming!

------
api
It's not here _yet_ , but automation able to fully replace human beings for a
huge number of jobs will eventually come. At that point a universal basic
income will be the only option other than walling off the majority of humanity
in ghettoes. Totalitarian "poverty state" or post-scarcity socialism, take
your pick.

I say this as a somewhat-former libertarian, and partly out of libertarian
sentiment. The totalitarian state that would have to be put in place to
enforce widespread poverty in a post-employment era would be significantly
less libertarian than the alternative. I imagine something that looks like a
cyberpunk noir horror film with drones and scanners and gates everywhere.
Since humans do possess empathy, the (few) rich would have to be surveilled
and policed as much as the poor; your wealth would be absolutely conditional
upon your support of the system. Ultimately the situation is unsustainable and
would collapse and probably lead to something even more totalitarian.

~~~
monort
It seems that you do not account for falling prices due to automation. And the
cost of automated machines will fall too.

~~~
api
That will happen for automation and manufactured goods, but not for assets and
anything else leveraged. If anything the in-deflation we are seeing today will
be amplified as central banks will be forced to keep money cheap to avoid
total deflationary collapse. Picture a $5 million starter home that costs
<$1000 to completely furnish.

This is what a post-scarcity society in denial looks like.

The reason cities like SF and NYC and London already look like this is because
they are the vanguard of the future. If present trends continue a house in
rural Kentucky will be as unaffordable relative to average wages as one in
SOMA. All that cheap money has to go somewhere, so if labor is deflating it
must go into assets.

In-deflation is "deflation of labor and the products of labor, and inflation
in assets, consumable resources, and essential services like health care and
education." It's been the condition in the USA and to some extent Europe since
2008. It's today's equivalent of stagflation in the 70s, something else
economists did not think (at the time) was possible and did not understand.
Some are starting to get it, which is why you see some starting to talk about
inflation in areas like housing separate from inflation in the rest of the
economy. In-deflation is not visible in traditional aggregate inflation
indices because deflating manufactured goods and labor are grouped with
inflating assets and essential goods/services and the two cancel.

~~~
redneck_
Can you recommend any further reading for in-deflation?

~~~
api
It's largely a concept I've encountered online, with varying degrees of
precision in discussions. There will be books about it in 20 years once the
academics notice, sort of like stagflation (which was "impossible"). It really
strikes me as an exact description of today's economic reality -- stagnant
wages, deflation in manufactured goods and anything tech, and crazy inflation
in areas like housing, rent, health care, and tuition.

So far this has been driven mostly by outsourcing, not automation. When
automation really kicks in with good AI, it's game over. There will be
universal basic income or blood in the streets.

~~~
redneck_
it's such a new idea google can't even find it

~~~
api
[https://www.google.com/#q=%22indeflation%22](https://www.google.com/#q=%22indeflation%22)

