
Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines - ph0rque
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/why-workers-are-losing-the-war-against-machines/247278/?single_page=true
======
acslater00
Yet another example of the "all labor is manufacturing" fallacy.

A future where machines displace most of what we currently think of as blue
collar workers is a future where most of the things blue collar workers
currently produce are much, much, cheaper than they are now. This author
worries whether blue collar jobs will pay "subsistence" wages. They will,
because the cost of subsistence [and indeed, the cost of a fairly satisfied
life] will be lower.

As machines become better at manufacturing and hard labor, unskilled "work"
will shift from physical to service industries. That's good! It's been
happening for the past century. Unskilled physical labor is hard, especially
as you get older and banged up.

A mechanized future is one where physical resources are plentiful. People will
figure out a reason to trade them. Humanity will be fine.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_A future where machines displace most of what we currently think of as blue
collar workers is a future where most of the things blue collar workers
currently produce are much, much, cheaper than they are now. This author
worries whether blue collar jobs will pay "subsistence" wages. They will,
because the cost of subsistence [and indeed, the cost of a fairly satisfied
life] will be lower._

This was the entire thesis of the neoliberal project. Over 30 years of
implementation, it has never once come true for basic subsistence goods.

Rent is not cheaper. Health-care is not cheaper. Energy is not cheaper. Food
is only slightly cheaper.

The primary good that has become massively cheaper is electronics.

~~~
learc83
>Health-care is not cheaper.

That's not a fair comparison. Modern healthcare is not cheaper, but healthcare
equivalent to what was available a generation or 2 ago is.

>Food is only slightly cheaper.

Food has pretty steadily been declining as a fraction of disposable income. It
would be declining even more dramatically if it weren't being offset by an
increase in eating outside the home.

~~~
potatolicious
Well, yes, but that itself is an example of how the theory fails - it assumes
that the bar for "subsistence" never moves.

By all measures we are _much_ better off than the average peasant in the
Middle Ages, and their lifestyle is now incomprehensibly cheap. But that's not
where the bar is at.

Ditto energy - the amount of energy a poor person can consume is astronomical
compared to that of a poor person even 100 years ago - but that bar hasn't
stayed still either. You don't take a horse-drawn buggy to work, and most
people have an expectation of keeping warm in the winters without huddling
around the stove.

I will agree on the food part - we have shown consistently that food cost, as
a proportion of income, is at some of the lowest it's ever been, and a massive
improvement over a century ago. This has been a clear win - but if you think
about it, this is hardly a surprise. The bar for "eats well, not hungry"
doesn't move very much over the decades.

~~~
justincormack
Most of the housing and transport costs are due to the extreme inefficiency of
working arrangements which telecommuting is disrupting.

~~~
Joeri
Telecommuting requires management processes that facilitate it. Until they
automate management telecommuting is not going to dominate, because the
average manager doesn't perform well enough to manage remote workers
effectively.

~~~
justincormack
I don't think management is going to be automated per se, it is just going to
continue to be a declining amount of employment, which it has been for a
while, as communication gets more efficient. But also arguably the large firm
is inefficient, as it is run on more dictatorial rather than market lines.
Also outputs like code are creating a whole way of measuring output thats more
useful than most office environments. Telecommuting in the form of outsourcing
to low wage countries is efficient enough to work for many cases too. So these
things might happen sooner than anyone expects.

------
nhashem
More analysis on Point #3 in this article was also covered by Paul Krugman
(liberal economist columnist at the NY Times):

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-
phy...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-physical-
capital/)

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-
and-w...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-wages-
the-analytics-wonkish/)

Basically it's simple: as more wealth creation is driven by technology, the
wealth shifts to whoever owns the technology or can operate it. Why is the
payoff for founding a successful technology company so potentially lucrative?
It's because you're basically both. If you think acqui-hires that pay
something like $1 million per engineer is a lot, that's basically why.

In the US, we _should_ have two political parties mitigating this by figuring
out the balance between helping low-skilled workers become high-skilled (e.g.
education funding and reform) versus making sure those unemployed low-skilled
workers don't get sick and starve to death on the street in the meantime (e.g.
unemployment and health insurance). Instead we have two political parties
arguing to the death about whether or not to raise taxes by 4.9%.

~~~
bennesvig
We already have a system that's supposed to help people become high skilled
workers, public education. Instead of producing competent workers, it churns
out compliant cogs.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It's designed to churn out compliant cogs, and through various forces has only
become better at doing so. Modern western public education is based on the
Prussian school system
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system>) which emphasizes
compliance, uniformity, attendance, punctuality, busy work, etc. All of which
are great for making functional factory workers, but that has become less and
less relevant as the nature of the economy has changed due to technological
disruption. More so, the increasing disempowerment of individuals and refusal
to treat students as adults in training (see: closed campuses, zero tolerance
policies, etc.) has merely exacerbated that impedance mismatch. Now we have
high school graduates who can barely read or do algebra let alone use rules of
logic to reason or communicate effectively on complex topics at a time when
knowledge workers are in the greatest demand in all of human history.

------
gmaslov
Why on earth is this framed as a "war against machines"? That's just plain
wrong. The machines serve people. If there's a war, it's between people and
other people.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_If there's a war, it's between people and other people._

Because pointing out the existence of class war is politically incorrect. Most
people would sooner admit to a race war than a struggle between the capitalist
class and working class.

~~~
csense
> pointing out the existence of class war is politically incorrect

Let me guess: You're not in the US. Because turning the issue into a battle of
rich-versus-poor is _exactly_ what the Occupy Wall Street protests, the
President's reelection rhetoric in the last election and the Democratic
framing of the present "fiscal cliff" crisis are about.

On a tangential note, "fiscal cliff" is a brilliant term from a certain
faction's marketing perspective -- once you describe the situation in that
way, you've _already_ committed to embracing a particular conclusion.

------
gregpilling
Whether or not a machine can replace me, I will still work. I enjoy work, I
get great satisfaction from doing work and completing a project I set out to
do. It may be an open-source project, it may be in my garden, but I will still
work because I do it for me. I personally can't wait until I have a robot to
do the heavy digging in the garden. I enjoy the planning part, and the
smelling of the roses more than the digging part.

Also, as a small manufacturer I am forced to train the people I have to adapt
to the new world order. The article implies that the uneducated worker is to
be replaced with the educated worker. I can't just replace my staff with all
new people. I would lose the tribal knowledge. I can't avoid automation that
my competitors have; it would put me at a big disadvantage. In fact the
biggest advantage I can get is to automate a process that we do manually. This
is why mcmaster.com will send you a huge catalog (printed) for free. It is
because the people that order from the catalog are price insensitive. I
certainly am when I have a broken machine. My automatic sand blaster needed
$1000 worth of bearings overnighted last month.

To make a big advantage in automation I need the help of the guy who has been
doing it manually. So we work on bottlenecks in production one after the
other. Every month we figure out what is slowing us down, or causing quality
variations, or supplier problems and we try to come up with a way to improve
things. The obvious first place to look for solutions is with the person
suffering with the problem. The next obvious thing to do is to use some
technology to make repetitive tasks easier. So my welder is now learning to
use Arduino, and we are working on updating some old machinery with new
automation. He might not do the coding, but he will certainly be the guy
bolting the hardware together.

So I would say the workers are not at war with the machines. The workers are
working with the machines.

------
alok-g
Alert: Newbie to economics here sharing some thoughts for feedback.

At time t -> infinity, the ideal state would not be humans not having jobs
(machines taking over), but humans not "needing" jobs (machines doing
everything we need to do today). This may however never be since natural
resources are limited, and so the cost of goods (while reducing due to
economically cheaper machines taking over) would never come to zero.

So then, as time progresses, the jobs for humans would end up being at the end
of the production-possibility frontier [1] where their sole motive is to
figure new things (entrepreneurship), while the machines take care of existing
methods of producing.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production-possibility_frontier>

~~~
wissler
Natural resources are virtually unlimited, at least for the current size of
the human race. We're only just scratching the surface of the resources
available on Earth, and there's a whole solar system we have access to. The
only issue is the technology required to transform these resources into
something useful, and the "permission" to create and deploy such technology.

~~~
evolve2k
Not so.

The assumption of 'unlimited natural resources' is now at odds with modern
economic theory.

By seeing natural resources as limitless and by extension free at source
undervalues their net economic contribution.

Take the example of massive ocean trawlers that cast kilometer wide nets then
bring back all the catch to sell at market. The trawler is not creating the
value of the fish just facilitating an arbitrage for the cost of delivery.

Companies are now looking at ways they can put a financial value on the value
of their natural resource inputs.

A failure in quantifying and pricing resources creates a mindset problem when
resources turn out not to be limitless or indescuctuble.

The World Bank, in it's 2011 report 'The Changing Wealth of Nations', set the
estimates for all the planets natural resources - its forests, rivers,
wetlands, wild lands, farm and grazing lands, minerals, oil and coal, oceans,
biodiversity of speciecs - at about $44 trillion dollars, with $29 trillion
belonging to developing nations.

Ref: HBR Oct 2011, the sustainable economy

~~~
wissler
Those figures by "economists" are woefully, comically limited, they only
consider natural resources as determined by current limits of politics and
technology, but in fact the whole solar system is rich with natural resources,
just waiting for people who actually have imagination (and liberty from the
punks who listen to those economists) to begin to capture.

~~~
wissler
E.g., we can't even increase fish farming productivity without massive
political interference:

[http://www.nature.com/news/transgenic-fish-wins-us-
regulator...](http://www.nature.com/news/transgenic-fish-wins-us-regulatory-
backing-1.12130)

------
sonabinu
Very reminiscent of creative destruction from Joseph Schumpeter - the whaling
industry was destroyed by the petroleum industry. The survivors are the ones
who possess the skills that are in demand. As the demand shifts, skills need
updating.

~~~
jeremyjh
Why would new industries and job roles always spring up to replace ones which
have become obsolete? I agree that historically this has happened but I see no
reason that it should be a necessary consequence. We have to consider the
possibility that a segment of the population will have no realistic options
for producing marginal value.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Because the labor and resources freed up from automation and increased
productivity allow us to pursue new things. There's always more to improve
upon.

Why would this segment of the population not have realistic options for
producing marginal value? Everyone is capable of learning new things.

~~~
jeremyjh
Why would those new things necessarily be labor intensive? Lately most new
profitable things require capital.

~~~
nickff
It should generally be presumed that when something has happened repeatedly
and predictably in the past, it shall continue to do so.

~~~
jeremyjh
Until it doesn't - how many draft horses do you see working now? Besides
which, we've got over fifty years of history telling us that wealth
concentration is happening faster and faster. If just that trend alone
continues then within our lifetime most people would not be earning enough to
sustain themselves.

------
pash
A couple of comments:

 _> People with little economics training intuitively grasp this point. They
understand that some human workers may lose out in the race against the
machine. Ironically, the best-educated economists are often the most resistant
to this idea, as the standard models of economic growth implicitly assume that
economic growth benefits all residents of a country._

No important model of economic growth assumes that growth or technological
progress benefits everyone. What _is_ broadly assumed (and there's a lot of
empirical evidence behind it) is that innovation is _the_ prime driver of
economic growth, particularly in advanced capitalist economies.

Economic growth means that society is gaining wealth in aggregate. And so long
as the pie is growing, it is always possible, in principle, to allocate the
gains in a Pareto-efficient manner (that is, in a manner in which _everybody_
gains) through the political process. Therefore many economists consider the
"distributional" question, concern about who gets what, to be of secondary
importance to their field. They see their job as figuring out how to maximize
the size of the pie and leave it to others to figure out how to divvy it up.
(Economists do of course have a lot to say about how various ways of
distributing the gains from growth affect the prospects for future growth.)

 _> Shortly after the Luddites began smashing the machinery that they thought
threatened their jobs, the economist David Ricardo, who initially thought that
advances in technology would benefit all, developed an abstract model that
showed the possibility of technological unemployment._

What the author is eliding here is Ricardo's development of the idea of
comparative advantage [0], one of the truly remarkable ideas in economics.
Comparative advantage is basically the idea that even if one country (or firm,
or group of people, or single person, or whatever economic unit you want to
think about) is better at producing _every_ conceivable good or service, that
country (firm/group/person/etc) will still gain from specializing in producing
the good or service it (they/he/she/etc) is relatively best at producing, then
trading with others—who will also gain by the interaction.

This insight does not mean that everyone will always gain from freer trade, or
from innovation (which can be thought of as essentially similar in this regard
to a relaxation of trade barriers with a country that's particularly adept at
producing one good or another). But it does suggest that there is a _net gain_
to be had from these developments. And, again, economists are primarily
concerned with growing the pie.

 _> At least since the followers of Ned Ludd smashed mechanized looms in 1811,
workers have worried about automation destroying jobs. Economists have
reassured them that new jobs would be created even as old ones were
eliminated. For over 200 years, the economists were right._

And that, really, is where I would leave things. There is very little to
suggest that technological progress is about to take on a fundamentally
different character, or entail much different results, than it has had, and
has done, throughout the course of human history. When the singularity
arrives, let's have this conversation again.

0\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage>

~~~
nickff
_> There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained
employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed._

The people of 1800 had poor reading skills, the people of 2000 are much better
at reading; meanwhile the horses have not improved their literacy. Horses are
not people. To suggest that low-skill workers are hopeless and cannot improve
themselves is paternalistic and insulting.

~~~
TheAmazingIdiot
Secondary school quality directly varies to the income of the school district.
Secondary school is "free" and compulsory. Post-secondary school rates have
massively skyrocketed. One needs loans, scholarships, and many other financial
aids. If you can afford to live for years on a minimal income (working
unskilled jobs) while going to school, you have a chance to graduate.
Employers won't hire unless you have a degree.

When education is out of reach for many of us, yes, hopelessness does very
well come into play.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Don't make the easy mistake of assuming that school spending is correlated
with educational outcomes, there is plenty of evidence that that's not the
case. I would suspect that the biggest reasons why educational outcomes tend
to be correlated with the income of the school district have to do with
culture, parental involvement, and educational levels of the parents. If you
grow up in a house of educated folks you are more likely to value education
and put effort into it, and you are more likely to be held to a higher
standard of achievement in education, regardless of the quality of the
education you get.

~~~
btilly
What are "cheap schools" today are outrageously expensive by the standards
when I was young.

The issue here is not whether a second or third tier school can give a decent
education, it is whether poor families see school as an option at all. When
you combine skyrocketing costs with growing numbers of horror stories of
people who are financially destroyed, and cannot even (as when I was young)
declare bankruptcy, more and more are going to make the economic decision that
they cannot afford higher education.

I am not sure that they are wrong.

------
stilltrying
This sentence grabbed my attention, but I'm having trouble getting a clear
understanding: "While efficient finance is essential to a modern economy, it
appears that a significant share of returns to large human and technological
investments in the past decade, such as those in sophisticated computerized
program trading, were from rent redistribution rather than genuine wealth
creation." In particular, modern finance as rent redistribution. The wikipedia
entry on 'economic rent' is helpful, but doesn't get me all the way there.
Help would be much appreciated!

~~~
aphelion
If I buy logs and built rafts with them, which I then sell to people trying to
cross a river, I'm creating wealth. If I own a strip of land up and down the
river and charge people who want to cross it in their rafts, I'm extracting
rents. If I patent the concept of raft building and require anyone building
their own rafts to pay me, I'm extracting rents.

What that quotation means is that all the finance MBAs and Wall Street quants
of the last decade aren't making the economic pie bigger, they're just
ensuring that they get a bigger slice of it.

------
digitalWestie
We need workers to transition to becoming owners or capitalists. Technology
now allows us to control the means of production much more cheaply than ever
before. Example: self-publishing

It's time our educational system reflected that.

------
nickik
Its funny, in my Oral History exams I got a Text and had 10 min to analyze it.

The Text could easly reprinted today, maybe switch out the word 'machine' with
'robot' once in a while.

This idea has been around since more then 100 years and it has shown again an
again to not be true. I have nothing against bringing up the same stuff again
but if you do that you have to improve your argument not just reprint popular
essays from 100 years ago with modern language.

Tell me exactly what fundamental thing has changed with todays innovations
that was not true for innovations in 1920 for example.

------
joering2
My conspiracy theorist side tells me that you don't need another War World to
"clean up" the world, because eventually, most will find themselves out of job
due to the raise of machines. They will be protesting on the streets, but when
you broke with steam pipe in the hand its hard to protest against heavily
armed LEs.

------
harryf
The reason why the "machines are winning" is most of the humans are held back
by idiotic corporate structures and processes. Take HR for example; I've yet
to see an HR department deliver real value that boosted performance.

------
Hitchhiker
" The future of work consists of learning a living " - Marshall McLuhan

------
wissler
The root problem is that instead of being able to appropriate resources from
nature and produce what we need as individuals directly, we've been corralled
into a setup where we have to get permission from government to appropriate
and transform raw materials. This is a completely artificial man-made problem,
due to various forms of fiat property, one important class being patents,
another being government-granted permission for resource extraction (but this
is not exhaustive).

It wasn't always so. Early man could claim and transform resources as he
needed. Now we are required, on pain of death really (if we try to disobey we
will be arrested, if we don't comply with the arrest we will be shot), to
either plug into the existing economic structures -- or to starve to death.

~~~
Riesling
> It wasn't always so. Early man could claim and transform resources as he
> needed. Now we are required, on pain of death really (if we try to disobey
> we will be arrested, if we don't comply with the arrest we will be shot), to
> either plug into the existing ecoIt wasn't always so. Early man could claim
> and transform resources as he needed. Now we are required, on pain of death
> really (if we try to disobey we will be arrested, if we don't comply with
> the arrest we will be shot), to either plug into the existing economic
> structures -- or to starve to death.nomic structures -- or to starve to
> death.

And this is in my opinion the number one argument for socialism. We have taken
people the possibility to go into self providing mode (by claiming land and
producing food and shelter) because WE as a society PROFIT from it.

If some people are not able to find a job in our current system, then we have
the obligation to make sure that those people still have access to our basic
services (food, shelter, healthcare).

------
ilaksh
> Ironically, the best-educated economists are often the most resistant to
> this idea, as the standard models of economic growth implicitly assume that
> economic growth benefits all residents of a country.

Because economics is not a science, its a religion devoted to making sure that
those who have money and power keep it and get more.

The idea that there is a set of high-skill jobs which are immune to
technological unemployment is false. It will just take a little while longer
for those jobs to be replaced by artificial intelligence.

The concept of superstars v. the rest is mainly just a weak argument
attempting to cover for the tendency of monopolies to form in any economy.
Technology just amplifies this fundamental characteristic of our 'economic'
system.

Technology directly opposes our 'economic' system because technology is the
application of science to solving problems (i.e. information and resource
_sharing_) whereas economics is about using proprietary information and
resources to your advantage.

~~~
anigbrowl
Economics is not scientific enough, but your statement is purely ignorant and
makes ti clear you've never cracked open an economics textbook.

