
The threat of technological unemployment - deafcalculus
http://lemire.me/blog/2016/12/26/the-threat-of-technological-unemployment/
======
beat
It's not just the existence of technological unemployment, it's the pace of
it. Over the past two centuries, we've shifted from an economy where virtually
everyone is a farmer to an economy where hardly anyone is a farmer. We've
mostly automated food production and distribution. But it took generations to
do it.

Today, people embark on careers in their 20s that disappear in their 40s and
50s. Such a pace of change is distressing. Consider how many people drive
trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out.
It'll be local short hauls only, places where there's a lot of human
interaction and judgment calls. Long haul semis will be entirely automated.
It'll save money and it will save lives, and it will be a huge boon to
everyone in society - except professional long haul truckers, who will lose
their livelihoods. They won't take it well.

Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can
do that. But what if it takes a year or more to retrain? How will they pay the
mortgage? How will they feed the kids? People who can't care for themselves
and their families feel weak, vulnerable, and ashamed. They'll be angry and
act out. They'll listen to political demagogues who tell them what they want
to hear and give them scapegoats to blame. Such a sudden social change is
politically dangerous.

~~~
moxious
A lot of the fear that comes from tech unemployment is based on predictions of
the future, which are notoriously horrible.

You give the example of trucking jobs which will be 90% wiped out. This hews
to the conventional wisdom you find on HN, but you'd be hard pressed to put
out real evidence that this will be the case on any identifiable near-term
timeline. I'm fairly sure there are exactly zero US states where bot trucking
is presently common. Going from "this technology is getting good" to "soon it
will own 90% of the market" is a pretty huge leap and bold prediction. Tech
readiness is only one small factor in whether or not this even could happen.

Bold predictions are, with hindsight, usually wrong.

A lot of these fearful arguments boil down to a simple syllogism; "if present
trends continue, then (bad outcome here)". The trouble with that is that
trends in general don't continue. Look back on the future predictions of 50
years ago, from any moment in time you choose as your reference point, and
you'll see uniformly that the future predictors expected certain trends to
continue which didn't, and missed the existence of other big trends that ended
up as primary drivers.

People just don't know what's going to happen in the future. I suppose
guessing is better than doing nothing, but we shouldn't think that the future
guessing we do is actually good or accurate, past experience teaches it's
actually really far off.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The fear comes from the unknown. Appalachia in the United States is what
people dread. High unemployment, jobs never coming back, addiction to pain
killers killing you in your 30s and 40s. Really, I suggest anyone on Hacker
News to take 2-3 days and drive through parts of West Virginia, during the
daylight only, to see, physically see, what the commotion is about. [1]

If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be worried
about being homeless, hungry, and without a support system. People would
embrace automation.

But that's the problem. The Technologist's Libertarian Outlook. Disruption is
okay, just help yourself to some bootstraps, and if you die in the street you
weren't valuable enough.

Protect against the unknown, and people will be less anxious about rapid
change. Don't protect them, and risk social instability. This is what
government, social programs, and taxes are for. Or we can wait for the 21st
century equivalent of the guillotines to come out.

[1] [http://www.post-
gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleto...](http://www.post-
gazette.com/local/region/2015/05/31/Littleton-W-Va-is-a-town-decimated-by-
poverty-drugs/stories/201504280190)

~~~
danielweber
_If we had solid safety nets, this wouldn 't happen_

It depends on their form. People aren't on drugs because they don't have
enough money. People are on drugs because their lives lack meaning, and simply
getting a government check won't change that. A man cannot provide for his
family by simply being alive to cash a check.

There are things that look a lot like welfare to the government that don't
look like it to the recipients, though. Wage subsidies could keep a lot of the
people who are below the threshold of self-sustainment actually engaged with
their communities.

And, for better or for worse, most people engage through their communities
with employment. Unemployed people, especially unemployed men, do not suddenly
become poets or volunteers for Meals on Wheels.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I appreciate you poking holes in my assumptions and suggestions, seriously,
because I don't know how to solve this.

I know I don't want parents/grandparents ODing on heroin in a parking lot with
a child in the back of the car. [1] So where does society start to fix this?
How do you give people purpose and the means to embrace that purpose?

What good are self driving cars/trucks, machine learning/AI, and all that
comes with it if you've hollowed out any substance your species had? EDIT:
Maybe the Amish had it right the whole time. Social fabric above "progress".

[1] [http://ktla.com/2016/09/09/ohio-police-post-photos-of-
adults...](http://ktla.com/2016/09/09/ohio-police-post-photos-of-adults-who-
overdosed-with-4-year-old-in-backseat-of-car/)

~~~
danielweber
Make labor cheaper. Not for the worker, but for the employer.

1\. Wage subsidy. Tax people like me more to increase the EITC. At the extreme
this is make-work jobs, but there is a lot of ground to cover between here and
there.

2\. Make employment cheaper. Cut down on employment taxes and other expenses
associated with employing people.

3\. Make employment easier. This won't happen overnight, but, after coming to
wage and term agreement with someone, I should be able to hire someone by
clicking a few links on a government webpage. And I say "I should" as a
person, not as a corporation. Make everyone in the country able to hire
another person quickly and easily. If I see too much trash on a street in my
neighborhood, let me hire people to clean it up a few times a week. I
shouldn't need any kind of HR department.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I disagree with you here: labor should be more expensive so make work jobs
(telemarketing anyone?) are driven out of the labor marketplace. I'd rather
the government provide jobs in a transparent manner that build, improve,
maintain infrastructure, national parks, etc. There's no reason we can't
transition from consumers to stewards of our local communities and national
resources.

I have yet to see an employer who is friendly to labor, so that's where I'm
coming from why I don't trust employers to be the solution (removing minimum
wage, wage subsidies, etc). Labor regulation should walk softly but carry a
big stick.

Example: We subsidize Walmart employees pretty heavily with government
resources. We should not be doing that, and I highly doubt most people in
those jobs feel as useful as they could be.

[http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/walmart-government-subsidies-
stud...](http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/walmart-government-subsidies-study)

[http://americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Walmart-on-Tax-
Day-...](http://americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Walmart-on-Tax-Day-
Americans-for-Tax-Fairness-1.pdf)

~~~
danielweber
Telemarketing isn't "make work." They are providing value to their employer.

You are hitting on one of my concerns, though: make labor cheap, and people
could be hired to basically annoy other people. I want to keep it simple, but
there are certain categories of jobs that need to be ineligible for wage
subsidy: anything that involves attempting to grab someone else's attention or
time. So no sandwich board walkers, no demonstrators, no telemarketers, no
door-to-door salesman, no picket walkers. Those can still be employed by
businesses if they want, but without subsidy.

If you don't trust employers, you can bid up the wages of labor yourself by
hiring people. Think what a non-profit interested in increasing recycling
rates could do with access to cheap labor. In fact, all sorts of environmental
issues are reduced by cheap labor. We can stop dumping old VCRs on China to
disassemble. A local environmental group can collect them, and then use a
disassembly line to teach workers the basics of technology repair while
breaking out all the components for responsible disposal.

If you want to keep people employed but not willing to risk employers possibly
benefiting in any way, well, it indicates that improving the standards of
living of the workers wasn't your real concern. Keep in mind that "the
government should take care of paying for health care" would fit in with my
recommendations but run afoul of your objections.

~~~
dispo001
In China, when [say] 100 people are about to get fired government will
negotiate a deal. That might be to have them hire 300 more for at least 2
years, get 25% of the salary in advance and have them provide training for
200.

I don't remember the exact numbers but it was some kind of custom combination
like that designed specifically for the type of business.

------
csallen
As I understand it (and I say this as a fellow "techno-optimist"), one of the
most significant challenges is that cultural and political change occur much
more slowly than technological change. So it's not that we _can 't_ adapt, but
that adaptation is exceedingly painful to various segments of the population.
We tend to accept certain facts as "permanently true", which ends up tearing
holes in society and in our lives when these facts inevitably change. For
example:

    
    
        * Building a long-term career at a single company is safe.
        * Traditional college degrees are worth the monetary cost.
        * Society can only function if everyone works a job.
    

I'm a bit skeptical that "we'll always find a way to quickly replace jobs"
will stand the test of time, especially when the primary evidence given is,
"Well that's how it's worked out so far."

~~~
ChuckMcM

       I'm a bit skeptical that "we'll always find a way to
       quickly replace jobs" will stand the test of time,
       especially when the primary evidence given is, "Well 
       that's how it's worked out so far."
    

Perhaps your skepticism can be allayed by looking at the mechanism. Money, in
the form of capital, flows through an economy from providers to consumers.
With a functional banking system capital doesn't accumulate. Even when a
company like Apple has $200B in "the bank", that money is being lent out to
others to build things and start businesses etc. Building stuff consumes labor
and that transfers money back to the labor force which then uses it to
purchase goods and services. All basic economics but the key is that the
existence of money (capital) creates an economic force. Banks cannot simply
sit on a pile of dollar bills and pay out 1.2% interest on that, they would go
broke. They need to make a return on it so they find people (economic force)
who will use the money to create additional value.

In many ways its like "running out of water" which on its face is
preposterous. The planet is literally covered in the stuff. The mechanism
(evaporation and condensation) which move it around the planet can put too
much or too little somewhere but we'll never be permanently "out" of water. It
will rain somewhere at some point (or snow) because water is evaporating from
the oceans every day.

Economies are very much like that as well, they may have capital dry up in one
area (like Appalachia) but it is probably raining somewhere else (like San
Francisco). But the mechanism of buying and selling products or services is a
constant force to move the money around.

So that money will always find a way to be spent. And that means jobs. They
may be different than the ones before but they will get created.

~~~
kbenson
I don't disagree with what you've stated, but I think the disconnect with what
you've stated and what the GP stated is that a specific unit of money doesn't
buy/pay for the same amout of jobs when applied in different areas (whether
"area" be geographic or sector). For example, taking money that previously was
applied to 1000 coal miners and applying it towards a software company yields
far fewer software engineers.

Additionally, people are a resource, but a very finicky one. You would expect
them to move to where there is a need for them, and to do what it takes to
make themselves usable, but there are many external factors that make that far
less likely than it could be, such as family, property, and various features
of human nature. So, as money flows from labor-intensive industries to non-
labor intensive industries, or transforms a previously high-labor industry
into a low-labor one, what happens to labor as it increasingly loses value?
What happens when the value of labor falls below the threshold required for
human survival for increasingly more segments of the economy?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Fair enough, but this "what the GP stated is that a specific unit of money
doesn't buy/pay for the same amout of jobs when applied in different areas" is
the basic fallacy. It is misses the point.

At a microeconomic scale, people are displaced. We saw last week an article on
one of the few book binders left in Manhattan, there used to be hundreds of
book binders. They stopped binding books. But the number of jobs in Manhattan
didn't go down to n - (# of book binders) because in a _macro_ sense what used
to be spent on book binding is being spent on something else. Maybe it created
a thousand jobs at print shops (for example).

We completely agree that people aren't fungible. Just like cattle die in a
drought, people without marketable skills go hungry and homeless. I, and many
folks I have talked to agree that one of the reasons you tax business is to
fund transition plans for people being left behind by changes in the job
market. Whether that is retraining programs, temporary shelters, or tuition
assistance for additional education. In my mind I consider that social justice
matter to be independent of the macroeconomic mechanism of job creation.

~~~
kbenson
> But the number of jobs in Manhattan didn't go down to n - (# of book
> binders) because in a macro sense what used to be spent on book binding is
> being spent on something else. Maybe it created a thousand jobs at print
> shops (for example).

But the assumption here is that there are still lots of jobs that need people
to shift people into. As a resource, we're consistently reducing the areas in
which it's appropriate and cost effective to use people instead of some other
resource.

This happens. Resources that were previously used for many things are
displaced by other resources which are fundamentally better in those
categories. Think stone age. Eventually stone as a resource was completely
surpassed in almost every area it was previously useful in. It's value has
been reduced to the point that if you have a large quantity of unsorted stone
material, it probably costs more to sort the useful bits than you can make
selling them, and without a _local_ market that wants to use it, you're stuck
trying to figure out the least costly way to either store or dispose of it.

I hope we aren't transforming ourselves into the equivalent of stone, where we
end up that figuring out which select few of us is capable of contributing in
some way is more costly than producing a product slightly worse quality but
much cheaper using automation the majority of the time, for the majority of
fields.

Hopefully I'm dead wrong and we transition to something far more uplifting,
because it's depressing to think this way.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I don't think you have to assume that _at the time of the shift_ there are
lots of jobs to shift into, only that as it shifts the economy will create new
jobs. Further I think those shifts are on the order of years not days, as
things shift over its going to be useful to cross train. For example, right
now there is a possibility that trucks can become self driving so if you drive
a truck you need to think of three things; 1) How much longer might this be a
viable way to earn a living, 2) what sort of new jobs are currently being
advertised as unfilled, 3) what resources can I apply to cross train into
something different than truck driving.

------
imagist
The idea of transemployment (work that is not needed, but is created to
prevent unemployment) is a terrible idea. Have we really become so brainwashed
that we have forgotten that the entire purpose of work is to create value?

Simply letting people not work doesn't remove incentives to perform: the
incentives that we have are already broken. We don't live in a meritocratic
economy: the Monsantos and Blackwaters of the world are rewarded for
destructive behaviors, while advertising allows inferior products to drive
superior products out of business. If we have enough surplus to support these
massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed.

Further, transemployment actually costs us. It requires infrastructure to
create fake jobs.

~~~
Kadin
> If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we
> can spare enough to support the unemployed.

This is demonstrably not true. I mean, it's tautological. We have the economic
surplus to support the unemployed, yet we do not. Therefore, the problem is
not the lack of economic surplus.

People have noted this apparent perversity for well over a century, but it
seems unlikely to change anytime soon. So the question isn't whether
transemployment is preferable to some lower-friction redistribution scheme,
but _whether transemployment is better than letting those same people starve_
, or die from opiate addition, or alcoholism, or diabetes, or any of the other
methods of benign neglect by which society has found to execute the
economically redundant.

Also, I'm not sure that "the entire purpose of work is to create value" really
encompasses the role of "work" in American society. The creation of value is,
to the worker, often a side-effect, since that value in the capitalist model
generally accrues to someone else besides the worker. The purpose of work for
most workers is to bring in _wages_ , which are necessary for personal
comfort, but more importantly (above a certain level) as chips in a zero-sum
game of social hierarchy. Extracting value from labor is the province of the
employer; extracting wages from time spent, regardless of value created, is
the province of the worker. The capitalist market's labor economy is the
resulting intersection.

~~~
imagist
This is just semantics. Typically wages are valuable--I don't know anyone who
is being paid in smiles. Ostensibly when work is done and paid for, value has
been created.

------
pcmaffey
Unemployment is not the problem. The problem is that the surplus / wealth
created by technology is controlled by the 1%. Redistribute that wealth and
the majority of the workforce will no longer need to be truck drivers, or
farmers, or laborers. Then, we can start paying people to learn.

~~~
zackmorris
I make a good standard of living for my location and I don't really ever spend
money so I'm saving it for retirement. If I invest it through standard
channels then that mainly benefits the 1% because they control investment
banking.

I'm thinking that one of the most disruptive things we could do is to invest
our money in nonstandard channels. For example, promote systems that solve
problems once and for all through research and then place the solutions into
the public domain. A handful of engineers working over the span of months or a
few short years could automate everything from wifi mesh networks to drone
delivery to robotic home gardens. In a very short time we could remove basic
need dependency from the system. Kind of like "a penny saved is a penny
earned" on steroids.

Once people are not dependent on a system that tends towards wealth
inequality, it would give them the leverage to demand a basic income because
they could choose to no longer buy the goods and services from which the 1%
derives its income. I'm not saying that members of the 1% are bad, just that
whatever benefits they bring society will likely be commoditized like
everything else when full automation provides cheaper (or free) alternatives.

~~~
grp
The 1% have to much power to slow down and to capture (as soon as possible, so
when states comes in) that kind of initiatives.

Look at the stories of alternatives energies.

The trick is here, I think too, but really hard with no free time.

edit: Maybe the automatization of the expropriation of the 1% won't be
captured..

------
david927
This is a _horrible_ assessment of whether we are facing technological
unemployment.

 _There are more bank tellers in the US than ever before_

But.. there are more people than ever before. And the number of bank tellers
is leveling off even as the population grows.

 _Overall, there is scant evidence that we are undergoing a technological-
unemployment crisis, if only because unemployment rates are low._

Are you _kidding me_? (First, you have to always be careful with any metric
where the collecting agent has even the slightest bias to the outcome.
Unemployment is not the obvious number you might think it is for a variety of
reasons.) Jobless and underemployment are the numbers you want to be looking
at -- and good luck getting good numbers on those but when you do, I think
they'll tell a very different story.

~~~
Animats
What used to be a "bank teller" is now a sales rep, trying to sell you on
loans and steer you to investments. Bank of America is rebuilding their
branches into a new design. There are maybe two teller windows in the back for
the occasional non-ATM cash transaction, while the front of the branch has
little glassed-in sales offices like a car dealership.

A lot of employment is in the marketing overhead of capitalism. There are many
products, from movies to Internet access, where the marketing cost exceeds the
product cost. This is zero-sum; most marketing in the US just moves demand
from one product to another. (Spending is income-limited in the US; the
savings rate is very low.) It's also why people are still working so hard.
Marketing is inherently competitive, which means it can chew up resources out
of proportion to the value produced.

~~~
Kadin
One of the issues with the "new economy" / "service economy" model that has
been pushed heavily over the past few decades is that it doesn't distinguish
between zero-sum jobs that have as their end goal merely a reallocation of a
fixed amount of resources, and jobs which create value and are basically
industrial in nature but where the end product is intangible (e.g. movies,
television, writing, software development, etc.).

State and local governments have spent vast sums trying to attract "new
economy" jobs to replace decimated primary industries, but I question how many
of those jobs are marketing or "economic overhead" related. That's not to say
that they're bad jobs at an individual level, or there's anything wrong with
anyone working in them, but it doesn't seem like it's a sustainable basis for
a national economy.

------
anf
> Some authors fear that technology will result in a radical concentration of
> wealth, the like of which we have never seen… while a few people will be
> super wealthy, all of us will slowly starve. Except that fewer people than
> ever in history are starving!

Starving is how revolutions happen, so probably not literally starving. But
poor people in the US are already wholly politically disenfranchised, and
children of poor parents likely to be poor.

The two questions which are important to consider in the light of extreme
automation: "how large and diverse is our oligarchy?" and "how much social and
economic mobility is there between generations?".

We are well on the way to having a small oligarchy like Russia and mostly
inherited wealth, at which point our society will simply cease to exist.

------
techbio
I would like to see a little more serious attention to the "participation"
rates in the workforce. Author is a little too reliant, for this particular
topic, on the 5% unemployment rate.

~~~
rqebmm
The recession certainly did a number on the participation rate, but the
current rate is more or less organic (as evidenced by recent gains in wages
once unemployment stabilized at ~5%).

A lot of baby-boomers aged out around during the recession, and will continue
to do so (people born between 1943-1951 all turned 65 during the recession),
and a lot of people went back into school to "hide" from it.

_Under_employment is still a serious issue, but that's only reflected in labor
statistics by median wages. On the bright side those have been going up too,
but aggregates only tell us so much.

~~~
pessimizer
I don't know what "more or less organic" means here. Using the prime age
(25-54) employment rate filters out that noise, and it shows that we've
retraced about halfway from the worst of the housing crash.

[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060)

edit:

...which is really terrible if you look at it in the longer term:

[http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-
population-r...](http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-
ratio-remains-terribly-depressed/)

------
awinter-py
hmm -- his 'transemployment' concept where complex processes are created and
assigned to people as 'jobs' is brutal. We've all worked at process-heavy orgs
and most of us have left them.

Process-heavy orgs will get out-competed by orgs managed almost any other way.
If you're optimized to create useless work for people, you'll probably lose to
an org that's optimized for something almost as silly like optimizing for high
cost of labor. My consultancy is optimized for high cost of labor and I do
okay.

Some people argue this is what's happening to France now. 40 years of shaping
labor law to improve retirement & reduce unemployment has taken its toll.
Paris is a smart tech-savvy and beautiful city that could have been Europe's
silicon valley, but you're not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week and
you can't fire people. Ah, 20-20 hindsight.

------
ranprieur
"If human labor were to become wholly unnecessary, we are going to substitute
for it through transemployment. That is, we will create work that is not
strictly needed."

In other words, bullshit jobs:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.o...](http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/)

That's fine if employment becomes fully optional, but I fear we'll be forced
into a life without the meaning of useful jobs, and without the freedom of
technological unemployment.

~~~
beat
Bullshit jobs are about the social order, not about productivity. People can
find productive things to do on their own.

"Bullshit jobs" depend on economic surplus to create work that is not
immediately productive in terms of food, shelter, or safety. Most entertainers
and craft artists fall under the definition of "bullshit jobs". Fine dining
chefs are doing something entirely unnecessary. So are rock stars.

~~~
dasmoth
It's a couple of years since I read that article but I'm pretty certain top
chefs -- who work directly on products that people clearly want a lot -- are
the exact opposite of the kind of alienated work Graeber had in mind.

~~~
beat
Sure they are. But those jobs exist because of economic surplus.

~~~
nopriorarrests
Well, all Apple jobs exist for the same reason.

------
russell
I have often wondered what happens when large scale technological unemployment
occurs, or even the threat of it. I think we have seen the result in the 2016
Presidential election with the election of Donald Trump, probably the least
qualified president since Harding. He's a psychopath, for god's sake. And his
cabinet is beyond comprehension.

The possible result is an attack on all branches of the executive except the
military. Replacement of Social Security and Medicare by virtually worthless
vouchers, elimination of the departments of Education, Housing, and Energy.
emasculation of the EPA. And on and on.

This could be as self-destructive as an armed uprising with fewer deaths
(maybe).

Many of the issues are easy to fix. Remove the wage cap on Social Security
taxes. Convert to health insurance to Medicare. Some of the unemployment
issues can be mitigated by making the workweek 30 or 32 hours. Turning truck
drivers into nurses or medical technicians takes a few years of training. Many
of them are smart enough to do it. The current stumbling block is that they
must have income support during the education period. Giving someone $100K to
manage the transition doesnt seem like much to me.

Fundamentally increased productivity and wealth should lead to more leisure
and a better standard of living for everyone. Eventually everyone should get a
minimum guaranteed income so they have time to pursue their education, raise
families, be artists or novelists.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome)
for an experiment on a guaranteed income.

------
DrNuke
Global economy & services may be fully automated pretty soon but local
economies? No chance, we are still going to have humans doing local trades and
services to other humans for the foreseeable future, just go back to your
roots as a member of a family, village, community.

~~~
visarga
> just go back to your roots as a member of a family, village, community.

I think unemployed people will start teaming up to solve their needs directly
- farms, small fab shops, schools, construction - we can make all these with
local workforce, "self employed for self reliance". We'd only need access to
raw materials and some land.

------
stevens32
AI is a fundamentally different technological innovation than the ones he
compares against in the post. It's not an incremental improvement on methods,
it's a complete replacement of the labor force for many industries.

But the problem to solve isn't how to blunt the impact of AI, rather how to
handle the newly freed labor force. I don't think this should be seen as a bad
thing. Tasks a machine can take care of should be left to a machine, and other
work should be handled by a human. We'll have a lot of open human capacity to
accomplish something, but if the transition isn't handled well it could be
really painful.

------
dkarapetyan
I used to think techno-optimists were delusional but history is on their side.
You could argue there is a phase shift happening and this one will be
different but I doubt it. Like the author says we'll make up new jobs.

------
CodeSheikh
The main thesis of this article is true but honestly the author has done a
very unconvincing job to back it up. For example my problem is with his
references: "Firm investments in high-tech equipment and software is
falling"...whereas the liked article is about "The recent slowdown in high-
tech equipment price declines and some implications for business investment
and labor productivity"

------
Animats
The real deal with technological unemployment is that the list of things
humans can do and machines can't keeps shrinking.

~~~
moxious
That has been true for at least 400 years. Humans have generally adapted by
inventing new things to be done that didn't exist previously. (The app
industry was very small 20 years ago. ;)

The interesting question is why people think this time around is different.
Answers seem to vary from just "computers" to, "the same change is happening
but now it's happening faster". The compensatory mechanisms still work though,
yet it seems no one things they will.

~~~
Gargoyle
People think it's different this time because the new machines are more
generally capable than the specific purpose machines of the past.

It's not "the new machine can gin cotton" or "the new machine can weave
cloth", it's "the new machine can handle an extremely wide range of problems,
and we're moving from having to teach it each problem individually to having
it teach itself."

This time _really is_ different and it's crucial everyone realize why as soon
as possible.

~~~
moxious
> It's not "the new machine can gin cotton" or "the new machine can weave
> cloth", it's "the new machine can handle an extremely wide range of
> problems, and we're moving from having to teach it each problem individually
> to having it teach itself."

It's funny you mention this because in the past few days on HN there have been
a number of articles whose general point was that the machine learning stuff
presently in use is well tailored to very narrow, specific problems, and that
the AI tech that would tackle a broad range of problems is still very elusive.

This new machine that tackles a very wide range of problems without massive
programming investment is something I've been wanting for 20 years, and I
still don't see anyone with plans to bring it to market.

~~~
Gargoyle
> the machine learning stuff presently in use is well tailored to very narrow,
> specific problems

It's more accurate to say the machine learning in use now works on narrow
_classes_ of problems. But even that is a giant leap forward from teaching the
machine to solve each problem individually.

Teaching a car to drive very specific routes is one thing (and has been
effectively done for decades now). Teaching a car to drive entire classes of
routes is something else, and where we are now. In a decade or so cars will
drive all classes of routes better than humans, and that will be something
else again.

------
ivan_ah
> _[...] the unemployment rate worldwide is low. It is under 5% in the US
> [...]_

I'm not sure how this is calculated. Do people employed part-time count as
employed? How has that changed over time? The problems of the _precariat_
include under-employment and being forced to hold undesirable jobs.

~~~
zdragnar
In the US, the official unemployment rate cited is the U-3 rate, which is
exclusively limited to those currently seeking a job, with no employment
status at all.

Partial employment (such as part-time) due to economic circumstances, as well
as those who are within the employable age range (18-60something) but are not
employed nor seeking a new job due to economic circumstances (i.e. gave up)
are covered by the U-6 measurement, which is substantially higher at 9.8%. See
here: [https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm](https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm)

That page also has links to historical measurements back to 2003, and you can
probably find further back (though I'm not sure if there are older resources
that also include the state-by-state breakdown).

------
crystalPalace
I'm getting an internal server error when I click on the link.

~~~
ElysianEagle
For now you can find it on the front page of the blog:
[http://lemire.me/blog/](http://lemire.me/blog/)

