

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs - caustic
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

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forgottenpaswrd
The problem is not technology.

The problem is that technology is being centralized by a few owners. A
computer in every pocket, 3d printers and CNC machines are very near to us.

Companies grow bigger and bigger, not because they are more efficient, on the
contrary, but because they could black mail society to sustain it. Too big too
fail became the motto of the new era, banks and industry companies so
inefficient with huge losses that nobody could touch it without breaking
society itself.

Those companies had done well, who needs to make cars when you can take $50
billion by the government to speculate in the stock market? A stock market
that is fueled by printing dollars by a central bank(inflating and raising
taxes of millions people).

Don't make me started with software patents in order for a few to own all
ideas. Society is collapsing to sustain unproductive parasites.

It will have to get worse before it gets better.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Technology could be making EVERYONE's lives better and decrease all of our
work hours, however the average American's work hours are not decreased
because instead of using technology to make everyone's work easier, the rich
guy uses tech to replace workers and pockets the profits from that.

------
wffurr
That technology destroys more jobs than it creates can only be news to
economists. Any one of us has put far more than one other person out of work
by automating their data entry or analysis jobs.

This essay on four possible futures along the axes of scarcity and equality is
highly relevant.

[http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-
futures/](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/)

Does a post-scarcity economy, the sort implied by democratizing production via
3D printers and cheap energy, necessarily imply a more equal society or can
the rentier class find a way to extract profits via patents and intellectual
property?

Conversely, if we end up constrained by natural resources — energy,
feedstocks, labor, etc. — is it even possible to move to a more equal society?

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hardwaresofton
While I didn't quite read this article (I skimmed), I talk (read argue) about
this subject very often with some friends.

I think in the end, the inventor of a technology is somewhat responsible for
figuring out what the people he/she will displace can do.

For example, if I'm about to put a whole industry out of work ('disrupt'ing
it), I think it would be reasonably responsible for me to offer training or
some kind of conversion for the workers of that industry (so they can use
/license the tool I have made).

~~~
loup-vaillant
You're assuming that displaced people should, or need to, work. Also, that
they _can_ work.

I'd say, not necessarily.

Think about the impending disappearance of professional driving. Automation
may not be total, but it will probably reach a point where a single human for
50+ trucks is enough (just have the truck communicate with its command
centre). So basically, the professional driving profession will likely shrink
by a factor of 10 to 100.

Now, what's a ex-driver to do? I doubt Google could, nor should, have an
answer.

Anyway, the reduction of necessary labour, which technology permits, should be
_good news_. If it's not, that's probably because our societies are ill-
equipped to deal with such progress.

~~~
hardwaresofton
Right, but an engineer/creator of such a service that realizes the impact of
that technological advancement should at least give forethought to what will
come about as a result.

If you're going to make an atomic bomb, you should consider the devastation it
might cost. While this ISN'T an atomic bomb, if you're going to so heavily
disrupt a field such that many people will find themselves out of work, at
least giving those people some thought seems to be the responsible choice.

On your last point, societies are always ill-equipped to deal with rapid
progress. In fact most of it is dismissed until it can't be ignored. However,
the problem of introducing change in a way that will not hurt/severely degrade
the life quality of large parts of society is worth tackling -- I don't think
people should just throw care to the wind and disrupt areas in which displaced
employees are unlikely to be able to bounce back.

Not that you shouldn't release the technology, just that some thought should
be given to the effects of your innovation.

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raspasov
The only way to stay ahead of the curve is by constant self-improvement.

I feel in todays world many people are slow to realize that they need to get
more technical. It's not like there isn't "jobs" or "work" that needs to be
done, it's just smarter, more technical work, with no clear-cut answers due to
the ever increasing amounts of data we can collect and process. Think about it
like this: "Programming skills in 2010s are the Excel skills of the 1990s".

~~~
tartle
that's not an answer for the majority of population, when the pace of good job
destruction is faster than good job creation.

no doubt, there's now plenty of opportunity for tech-workers, who will profit
from the process (at least as long as their jobs don't get automated away,
too). but the wages are already stagnant also in this sector - when the entry
of new workers will undercut current engineers' negotiating position (and it
will, as engineering becomes the only safe-heaven on the labour market), they
will gradually face similar fate as the rest of the workers. the real winners
of automation are the owners of capital.

~~~
raspasov
Until AI that's comparable to a human brain is invented (which I don't see
coming in the next 100 years), there will be an ever increasing number of
problems to be solved by humans, and as a result, an ever increasing number of
opportunities for humans in all sorts of industries.

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unono
Hackers can solve this problem

\- cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in
businesses into small bite size chunks that can be done by masses of unskilled
workers. This is purely a software task that hackers relish.

\- training workers cheaply and effectively, khan academy/udacity/coursera
style.The business model for this should not be charging students (an evil
practice carried out by colleges) but instead charging businesses for access
to those workers.

\- decentralizing production. Making what is produced by large factories
produceable in the home. 3d printers, home robots, and so on. These are also
mostly software problems of controlling mechanical parts.

That there is joblessness is mostly because hackers are not thinking
creatively and working hard enough. Help will not come from other segments of
society, they are incapable of doing so because they lack the key skill of
which we hackers are famous for - inventiveness.

~~~
jiggy2011
Services like Mechanical Turk/TaskRabbit/eLance etc emphasize workers as
commodities leading to a race to the bottom in prices and the most profit for
the platform vendor.

Looking at the average earnings on these sorts of platforms it would seem like
a challenge to eek out even a meagre existence in a first world country.

~~~
unono
The reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in
them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to
middle class level.

This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs
model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion-
dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year
from a billion users. Imagine a mechanical turk that grew to a billion users -
it could be taking $500 a month from users while paying them $5000 a month.
Truly immense potential.

~~~
jiggy2011
Not sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour.
This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can
expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that
will get the work done.

Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these
platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a
cut when they are capable of finding customers on their own. This leads to a
sort of lemon market where the buyers who are willing to pay the highest rates
for the best workers will tend to avoid these places altogether.

~~~
unono
You're totally correct when it comes to skilled work, they get snatched up
when they've proven their worth. However, this cloud labor is for unskilled
work.

So yes, they are commodities, but if they are a lot of them, and a lot of work
to go around, wages rise. We saw this with the industrial revolution,
especially assembly lines. Mid 20th century you could live pretty well as an
unskilled assembly line worker, but then the work dried up.

Most modern work, knowledge work, hasn't been turned into assembly line yet.
Many would argue that's because it can't be, but I disagree with that, much of
enterprise software is about turning it into that (workflows,processes). It
just requires more of the same. There are actually very few cloud labor
startups (mturk, crowdflower, mobilworks) with at most a 100 programmers, one
reason being that it doesn't have the network effects moat that VC's look for.
Robotics is another casualty of that. How do you defend your cloud
labor,robotics company from competition? That's why it will have to be built
from the ground up by bootstrappers.

~~~
jiggy2011
These platforms make it easier to find labour and thus drives more competition
between labour providers but they don't necessarily increase the demand for
it, at least at higher pay rates.

It also makes the competition for knowledge work go international which might
increase pay in developing countries but lower it in first world countries.

~~~
unono
Oh sure, it will equalize wages across the world, with some rich worlders
losing in the short term, but I think that's a good thing, why should poor
worlder's suffer.

Higher pay rates exist for two reasons, unfair monopoly positions (e.g. bill
gates and the OS monopoly of the 90s, actors/athletes), and because there is
complex work that hasn't been deskilled yet. Not much can be done about the
former except regulations, the latter is where programmers can change the
situation. Demand is everywhere - whether it's fulfilled by cloud labor, or by
specialized labor - is the question.

Either way, I think we can agree that immense opportunities exist for startups
to profit from this space.

~~~
jiggy2011
There's certainly profit to be made in being a middle man in the labour market
but that doesn't really solve the fundamental problem.

If you equalize wages you also need to equalize the cost of living which is
something that doesn't seem to be happening because a lot of people have a lot
of money locked up in land etc that they are not going to want to see
devalued.

If deskilled work does not cover rent payments then it is not much good to
anyone.

~~~
unono
I have to disagree about being the middle man. Deskilling the workforce into
an assembly line is a value creating activity, it's what engineers basically
do. The typical middle man is simply there to skim some money because there
are communication bottlenecks.

Yes, you're totally right - land will get devalued. The older generations in
richer countries will lose the most relatively. This is not a bad thing
fundamentally (it reverses the rich get richer trend), and is actually what's
already happening, but people don't feel it. Every story that is heard about
poverty reduction in China is also a story of westerners getting relatively
poorer - though in absolute terms everyone is getting better quality of life.

~~~
jiggy2011
Deskilling the workforce may be a valuable activity but those who make the
best of it will be those doing the deskilling rather than those who are
deskilled.

I'm not sure that the older/richer will lose out. They have a lot of political
clout that they will bring to bear to keep value in their homes and retirement
assets. A lot of this will be hoarded rather than redistributed so demand will
continue to outstrip supply in many areas.

~~~
unono
The 'rich' in this case are middle and upper middle classes (wealth in homes),
not the uber rich (wealth in stocks), so they don't actually have that much
clout (doctors, teachers etc) on the international level, and they already are
losing out. Doctors are relatively poorer than in the 60s/70s.

Deskilling benefits everyone, is leads to more equitable wealth distribution.
The people inventing the assembly lines (hackers) will be paid more than the
assembly line worker (cloud laborers), but that's a fair reward for the
effort. They won't be much richer (just like mechanical engineers who invent
factory equipment) because fierce competition will prevent it (there aren't
network/platform effects that lead to gates/zuckerburg).

------
sjwright
Technology has destroyed jobs for hundreds of years. It means we as a species
are continually releasing human labour resources to tackle newer, more
exciting challenges.

The difficulty is transitioning these labour resources from tasks now
mechanized, to new endeavours that society is interested in solving.

~~~
dllthomas
Long term, there's potentially a point where we can repurpose mechanization
faster than we can repurpose people. I certainly don't make the claim that
we're there yet, though.

Short to medium term, one angle is figuring out how to actually get people
paid for the new stuff - there is a lot that creates value that is difficult
to capture.

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porter
The answer to a complex system like the economy is never so simple.
Technology, the shift from a productive to a finance, insurance and real
estate economy, artificial interest rates, stock bubble, housing bubble,
credit crises....

There are a lot of factors that contribute to fewer jobs. When it comes to
technology, yes, technology destroys jobs. But never on a net bases. 100 years
ago 40% of our economy worked in agriculture. Today it's less than 2%. Yet
people aren't longing for the days of farming. Technology alone is not the
culprit.

------
noloqy
What's the problem exactly? Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years?

Productivity is the ratio of units of output per unit of input, where you can
abstract input as being either capital or labor. Indeed, productivity
continues to grow as a consequence of technological advances. When mankind
started using oxes to plough fields, landworkers' productivity rose
significantly. As we develop more tools to aid us in daily tasks, less labor -
and sometimes even less capital - is required to perform those tasks.

During the relatively prosperous past decades, organizations have grown heavy,
and were able to do so because of a continuously rising product demand. People
started over-working and over-consuming. Then there was an external shock,
media started talking about a financial crisis, people started being more
considerate of their consumption in the face of job insecurity, and businesses
that grew too heavy needed to get back into shape. This is a process that has
significant feedback effects. The process of business getting back into shape
means the cutting non-contributing jobs (think of excess layers of
management), which by itself causes a growth in productivity. In this sense,
employment growth and productivity growth can be negatively correlated, and it
is not necessarily "technological advances" that drive productivity growth.

Telling us that technology is destroying our jobs is the same as telling us
that China is stealing our jobs, though they may affect different industries
(I don't see Chinese laborers replacing our butchers.) The thing is that the
working population is very flexible, and despite offshoring certain jobs the
average American still works over 50 hours a week. Population growth hasn't
justified job growth in the US for the past 40 years, so perhaps a stagnant
job growth is a good thing in that it draws things back to "normality".

~~~
ronaldx
One problem is that we have trained people to do (and are still training
people to do) jobs which are being replaced by computers and technologists who
can do the same job more productively. This is beginning to have a significant
impact upon all industries.

The economy is doing great, productivity is doing great, but there are
increasing numbers of people with obsolete skills who can't find work and are
struggling to survive this improving economy, through no fault of their own. A
small number of people are taking all the benefits of the new economy -
entrenching inequality.

The problem is with people, not with the economy.

~~~
victoriap
The replacement of muscle by automation was 20th century. In the current wave,
we see a replacement of office workers with a mix of more productive office
workers outsourced, online or in house.

~~~
ronaldx
I think we are seeing a restructure of skilled work generally as technology
becomes able to do portions of skilled work. For example, look at education.

Interestingly, muscle jobs are more-or-less immune as they have already been
automated as much as is reasonable.

------
scotty79
Semirelated:
[http://www.sjbaker.org/humor/pythagoras_costs_jobs.html](http://www.sjbaker.org/humor/pythagoras_costs_jobs.html)

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peterjancelis
Cheap interest rates are destroying jobs.

Artificially low interest rates == artificially high amount to spend on
machine replacing labor == labor earnings go down as percentage of the
economy.

------
Zigurd
While you cannot view technology as some kind of force of nature, immune to
ethics, blaming the misery of joblessness on technology is beside the point.

When is the last time the minimum wage was raised? The last time the work week
shortened? Those laws are in place because of technology eliminating human
labor. Those legal changes were the solution to a problem technology created.
But they have not been updated while technology is galloping away. We blithely
crush low-skill, entry level jobs because they are easy to crush.

Technologists have a responsibility to mitigate the impact of technology. But
the answer isn't to restrain technology. The answer is to deliver benefits to
society as a whole, and that comes from restructuring our economy to benefit
workers.

~~~
rondon
If you raise the US Minimum wage to $20 an hour you will immediately see
people move their companies to Mexico,China,etc.. So that will only make the
problem worse. Instead of making $10 an hour those employees will be making
$0.

~~~
fiesycal
Honest question which companies? Which companies that currently pay workers
minimum wage are able to move overseas? Mcdonalds, Walmart etc cannot move
their service jobs overseas.

~~~
jiggy2011
It might incentivise those companies to find ways of doing business with less
human labour. For example computer checkout /ordering systems or more emphasis
on doing business online.

------
thenerdfiles
«In our own time, the development of technology and the growth of cities has
brought man's alienation from nature to a breaking point. Western man finds
himself confined to a largely synthetic urban enviroment, far removed
physically from the land, his relationship to the natural world mediated by
machines. Not only does he lack familiarity with how most of his goods are
produced, but his foods bear only the faintest resemblence to the animals and
plants from which they were derived. Boxed into a sanitized urban milieu
(almost institutional in form and appearance), modern man is denied even a
spectatorial role in the agricultural and industrial systems that satisfy his
material needs. He is a pure consumer, an insensate receptacle. It would be
cruel to say that he is disrespectful toward his natural; the fact is that he
scarcely knows what ecology means or what his enviroment requires to remain in
balance.»

— "Towards a Liberatory Technology", Lewis Herber [Murray Bookchin]

~~~
thenerdfiles
Follow-up:

«Unfortunately, the singularity may not be what you’re hoping for. By default
the singularity (intelligence explosion) will go very badly for humans,
because what humans want is a very, very specific set of things in the vast
space of possible motivations, and it’s very hard to translate what we want
into sufficiently precise math, so by default superhuman AIs will end up
optimizing the world around us for something other than what we want, and
using up all our resources to do so.»

—
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y9lm0/i_am_luke_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y9lm0/i_am_luke_muehlhauser_ceo_of_the_singularity/c5tm6fu)

------
_random_
Well, who is the nerd now?

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jjaredsimpson
certain jobs.

~~~
Alterlife
That's what the article says as well:

> In other words, in the race against the machine, some are likely to win
> while many others lose.

~~~
hannibal5
Majority will lose, minority will win.

~~~
noir_lord
Till the revolution then the minority will lose and then everyone has lost.

