
The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all? - rpm4321
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/08/the_new_luddites_what_if_automation_is_a_job_killer_after_all.html/print/
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istjohn
Current top comment:

I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum
income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the
guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and
work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot
more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should
productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a
cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-
away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income.
--Mark Russo

This.

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grinnbearit
Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even
entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed
amount of tax revenue to fund it, say 10%. Then as productivity goes up and
goods become cheaper, this 10% can provide even more.

Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other
people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out of fear of death,
only for want of choice.

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istjohn
In kind welfare is notoriously inefficient. The bureaucracy required weighs
down the system. No one knows what they need better than the people
themselves.

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tomjen3
Inefficient in what terms? If you want to optimize for a nice current life for
that person you give money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work
without starving then you given physical goods.

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dragonwriter
> If you want to optimize for a nice current life for that person you give
> money, if you want to optimzing for getting back to work without starving
> then you given physical goods.

If you want to optimize for getting back to work in an economy which is
rapidly changing, you provide (1) resources which are flexible in form so that
people can address different reasons why they might be out of work and the
different needs they have to meet to get back into work, and (2) you provide
aid in a form makes it easy for people to benefit from work income as additive
to the aid.

Money is better for both than a standard-issue set of goods.

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m0nty
This is a serious and interesting subject which requires a better treatment
than emotive words like "hand-wringing" and "worriers", and a conclusion with
more depth than "in the long run, we're all dead." All the author really says
is that experts disagree on the effects of automation (who would have
guessed?) and that this might lead to lower pay and fewer jobs (again, hardly
news).

Meaningless assertions like "the education system has to change to prepare
young people for a world in which most of today’s jobs are automated" don't
begin to answer the real question - how are we to be prepared for this change?
What are we expected to do with our time without paid work? How does an
economy run if a significant number of people are not earning more than a
basic wage?

Fascinating subject, superficial and unhelpful article.

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crisnoble
>What are we expected to do with our time without paid work?

What would you do if you had infinite free time? I would spend more time
exploring my city, read more books, and finally get around to my garden
project. In fact, I fantasize about retirement all of the time because I
imagine myself doing these things.

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wyager
Right up until we invent strong AI (and probably even then), there's no
particular reason the same thing that always happened won't keep happening;
unskilled laborers will get replaced, most will retool, and no one in the next
generation will train for the now-automated job. This happened to cordwainers,
calculators, etc.

The reasoning for this is very simple. It's why the Luddites were wrong then
and the Luddites are wrong now. When a job is automated away, the benefit is
distributed among three areas: 1. Automation company profit 2. Automation user
profit 3. End customer costs. The net benefit is always positive, or else the
automation would not be used in the first place. These 3 groups do not take
their earnings and hide it under the mattress. This newly produced value has
to be spent somewhere. So we end up with fields that were historically not
viable, but because automation lowers the overhead of doing other things, now
are viable. These fields recreate the labor requirements "lost" to automation.

The question, of course, is how long it will take for unskilled laborers to
retool, and what will they do in the time between jobs? Perhaps there will be
technical solutions to speed the retooling process.

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m-i-l
The argument resolves around the "longer-term trend toward income and wealth
inequality". There is nothing however to directly link this to technological
innovation. In fact I believe it is government policy which is increasing
inequality rather than technology. In the UK for example, we have been seeing
some clear cases of policies which have (either deliberately or inadvertently)
transferred wealth from the state (i.e. the population as a whole) to the
elite (i.e. the rich), e.g. the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

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bottled_poe
Job-killing is a GOAL of technological innovation, and this is a good thing.
In an ideal world this would free up our time to be spent doing things we as
humans WANT to do. Technological improvements should decrease the price of
good and services because less resources and efforts are required to provide
them. Sadly, this is not what we have seen. Working hours go up, and so do the
prices. Perhaps it is due to the nature of capitalism, something like Jevon's
paradox or some other unexpected behaviour.

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crdoconnor
>Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik
Brynjolfsson, among others, see a “great decoupling” of productivity from
wages since about 2000 as technology outpaces human workers’ education and
skills. Workers, in other words, are losing the race between education and
technology. This may be exacerbating a longer-term trend in which capital has
gained the upper hand on labor since the 1970s.

Yeah, not really. Capital gained the upper hand through systematic
lobbying/corruption of government and trade policy. It wasn't robots in
Wisconsin that took American jobs, it was Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese,
Guatemalan and other factory workers in factories built with American money.

This article is not really supposed to be a serious analysis of technological
trends. It's mostly insinuation (wealth inequality is getting worse and robots
are getting better. coincidence?), anecdotes about robots and a survey asking
a bunch of experts what they think will happen in the future (this has never
been a reliable way of predicting the future).

Now for the really interesting question: why does this article exist?

This article decrying the 'new luddites' exists for mostly the same reason why
somebody paid a bunch of money for this advert:

[https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg)

The reason this meme is _really_ pushed, in both adverts like the one above,
talking heads on TV and editorials like this (hastily researched; mostly
cribbed from the output of think tanks) is largely to keep workers afraid and
insecure.

Insecure workers keep their head down, don't strike, don't demand raises and
work overtime without complaint. All of these things are good for profits.

This isn't to say that automation won't make job roles obsolete, just that its
purported effect on net job destruction (i.e. jobs lost - jobs gained) is
likely to be significantly overstated for very clear political reasons -
keeping the working classes disenfranchised.

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Kiro
Technological innovation is more important than any job.

~~~
oddevan
Can you elaborate? For example, what is the end-goal of technological
innovation? What's the end-goal of any job?

To me, the point of innovation is to make people's lives better. Growing
pains, a temporary loss of one type of job, those are inevitable when talking
about innovation. But people adapt, they get new jobs, sometimes enabled by
the very innovations that displaced them in the first place. That's fine,
that's the pattern in the world so far.

A blanket statement like this seems to say that progress for its own sake
should be prioritized over the people said progress is supposed to help.

~~~
tomjen3
A job is a means to an end. Technological innovation is a means to make our
lives better. There is no end goal because there is no limit to how good we
can make it.

