
Are jobs obsolete? - mcantelon
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/
======
jerrya
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work>

_The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the
Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin,
published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]

In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as
information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the
manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He traced the devastating
impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a
small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers reap the benefits of
the high-tech world economy, the American middle class continues to shrink and
the workplace becomes ever more stressful.

As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth
of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that
will create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods
and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling
down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and
services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in
lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers._

He was mostly laughed at.

~~~
hpvic03
It's not so impossible to believe.

The objection I often hear (and I recall that this is PG's stance as well) is
that as old jobs disappear new ones will take their place. For example, as the
article mentioned, the former toll booth operator could now repair the
automated toll booth system.

So far this general idea has been true. Before computers existed as we know
them, "computers" were people who did lengthy computations for a living, often
for scientists. Once electronic computers arrived these people seemingly found
new jobs and survived.

I'm not sure if this will continue to be the case. We may be reaching a
discontinuous point on the economic timeline. If robotic and computer systems
are developed that can effectively do the jobs of most humans for less than
minimum wage, there won't be enough work for people to make a good living.

The key difference is the following: in the past, technology has only
disrupted specific segments of the economy, allowing humans to find work other
places where they could still add value. Now, technology has the potential to
disrupt the majority of the economy. There _won't be_ any work to do.

There will still be pockets where humans can add value, but there will be so
much competition for this work by all the unemployed that the wages will be
driven down to nil.

If this situation occurs, the Government will have to find a way to distribute
resources directly to the masses lest every sitting politician be voted out of
office. In fact, all the rhetoric right now about creating jobs is exactly
that. Politicians are promising that they'll find a way to distribute
resources to the unemployed.

~~~
jerrya
I agree.

In the Star Trek economy (afaik), the inwention of the replicator was key to
the end of money and the end of a scarcity based economy.

Well, we already have a replicator for much of the economy

    
    
        $ cp
    

And it looks as though soon we'll have some very advanced robots that will be
able to automate most mundane jobs.

So maybe this is good and we can all become Platos, relaxing, philosophizing,
self-actualizing at the top of Maslow's pyramid. If so, it should be
reasonable to convince everyone to go the Star Trek way and jettison money.

What will be dangerous, is dangerous, is the transition periods like now,
where jobs that are lost, never come back, not just because they have been
automated away, but also because the owners would rather pay more for
automation and less human involvement because they find humans to be a big
pain. At that point (which is sort of like now) it is hard to convince others
that it is reasonable to distribute resources to the masses.

I would certainly like to see a single payer, universal health care system
implemented that separates health care from monolithic employers. That, and
I'd love to see actual real encouragement and incentivization of small
business entrepreneurship.

Remove the barriers that big companies have on us. Make it easy and rewarding
for people to create their own jobs, form their own companies, on a semi-
permanent or even ad-hoc way.

Oh well, pie in the sky.

~~~
hpvic03
You make a good point about the transition period.

I'm a fan of Kurzweil and am convinced that many of his predictions will come
true. However, he paints a rosy picture of the future and glosses over any
potential conflict in the transition between between now and when he predicts
that humans will merge with machines, which he pegs at 2099.

There is definitely going to be conflict as we move to a post-scarcity world.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Oh, but there already _is_ conflict. While information basically got out of
scarcity, the copyright overlords are still clinging to their old ways.

------
sc68cal
The USPS may not be an ideal case study, since it is the only entity that is
required to pre-fund 75 years worth of health benefits to employees.

[http://about.usps.com/news/national-
releases/2011/pr11_102.h...](http://about.usps.com/news/national-
releases/2011/pr11_102.htm)

"Without enactment of legislation by the end of this month, the Postal Service
faces default, as funds will be insufficient to make a congressionally
mandated $5.5 billion payment to pre-fund retiree health benefits, Postmaster
General Patrick Donahoe told a Senate committee today."

This was a manufactured crisis, passed by a lame duck Republican congress in
2006. See Title VIII - Postal Service Retirement and Health Benefits Funding
in the following link:

<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-6407>

Yes - E-mail has made an impact on the USPS' bottom line, but it's because of
POLITICS that the USPS is in such bad shape.

~~~
ricardobeat
Specially considering that the average volume/weight/cost by package must have
increased tenfold because of e-commerce.

------
alpad
Jobs aren't obsolete. There are plenty of jobs. Part time, low wage, no
benefits jobs. Careers? Full time, living wage that can support a family, full
benefits packages? Those are becoming obsolete, and fast.

Screw any politician who crows about "creating jobs". I would support one who
can create careers. Won't happen.

~~~
mmj48
> Jobs aren't obsolete. There are plenty of jobs. Part time, low wage, no
> benefits jobs.

The 600,000 the article mentioned were mostly of this type, I presume (not the
part time maybe, but the other two).

E.g. Secretarial/bureaucracy type jobs which rarely pay more then $15/hour,
and usually ~$10/hour, are quickly being replaced with computers.

> Careers? Full time, living wage that can support a family, full benefits
> packages? Those are becoming obsolete, and fast.

I wouldn't say obsolete. I doubt they're growing at the same rate of the
population, but there are still many fields where building a career is a
reasonable venture.

------
philwelch
I love how the media overreacts to everything. Here's a pretty obvious maxim:
nothing is as good as it seems at its best, and nothing is as bad as it seems
at its worst. To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last couple of
years are just that, a recession and slow recovery--they aren't a harbinger to
the end of capitalism or conventional labor or employment. The jobs are
already coming back.

Psychologically, people seem to have a basic need to do something productive
with at least a good chunk of their time, and jobs do fulfill this important
need. The jobs might become more abstract and more indirectly removed from
everyday necessities, and hours might even drop, but I don't think they'd go
away.

~~~
icandoitbetter

        To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last 
        couple of years are just that, a recession and slow 
        recovery--they aren't a harbinger to the end of   
        capitalism or conventional labor or employment.
    

The recession and slow recovery are what we make of them. The future is not
already determined. There may or may not be the end of capitalism, but that
doesn't say anything about whether that's a goal we should pursue.

Even though Rushkoff believes that automation is killing jobs, he doesn't
believe that the alternative he proposes is inevitable. He just invites us to
consider it.

------
zanny
It is more a problem of motivation. Since we have not yet stopped universal
entropy to guarantee our unending existance forever, we still have progress to
be made.

Too bad we have probably billions of human beings not contributing towards
that progress.

We need people motivated to enter the sciences and engineering disciplines to
make the future happen. We will probably see our means of survival fully
automated in our lifetimes, and besides the imminent highly coupled crisis of
global warming / overpopulation / resource depletion this century, we will
probably emerge from it in a state where no person born will ever need to toil
to survive to the next day.

We might even get to the point where people don't die, or aren't bound to
biological form.

But we are too busy complaining about celebrities on TV and our neighbors to
have a collective motivation towards progress. The greatest problem to solve
in the 21st century is one of motivating people to tackle hard problems to
progress the whole of humanity, en masse.

~~~
moddedarmstrong
I accept that humanities continuation as a species depends on science/tech,
there has to be more to it. Living longer and expanding further should be the
how, not the why.

Unifying people into action is historically only possible by getting them to
engage in shared values and beliefs. We need culture, politics, philosophy
and, dare I say it, religion to motivate people into tackling these problems.
Promoting science beyond these seems unlikely to result in the kind of Utopian
vision you are talking about.

Also, is toiling always such a bad thing? Hard work can be rewarding too.

------
hef19898
In Europe, some people are thinking of replacing welfare by a certain ammount
of money being payed to everyone, without condition, everymonth. Could be
solution, even if you have to work out the details of such a scheme. What
makes this different from any system we have today is, that people not working
are most likely not stigmatised anymore. Currently you have condition attached
to recieving money from the state, so as soon as you can get away from these
conditions you will. Meaning you need a job , a.k.a. employment. The result
is, that everybody without a job has nothing to offer to an emplyeer. Hence,
the stigma that he's worthless. But he isn't, maybe he only has talents nobody
is willing to pay enough to make a living these days. If this really is a
solution or how we can get there, well no idea. But we should think about it.
As soon as there's enough for everyone, why not letting everyone participate
on it. And when you look at the conditions you have to get your money when you
ARE employed, well I'm not sure you're better of than without a job, from a
self-respect point of view I mean.

------
skylan_q
Not many have mentioned policy here, just automation.

How are we to create sustainable jobs if we keep taxing, regulating, etc...
such that we increase the requirement for marginal productivity of labor in
order to turn a profit?

Basically, on-the-job training and low skills employment could be made more
profitable by making it so that there is some room left for the free market.
If they have lower non-employment costs, then they will be able to hire less
productive people. This drives demand for employment, and thus, wages.

But I'm not suggesting that this will ever happen. ;) Some people in power pay
lip service to the free market while attacking it, and others aren't shy about
attacking it. We create "make work" jobs that come at the cost of companies
and individuals. If it didn't come at the cost of companies and individuals
their costs would be lower. If enough wiggle room was given, on-the-jobs
training would be possible, and low-skills labor more profitable.

As of April, the US will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world.
This approach doesn't seem to be solving the inequality of wealth problem, and
it doesn't look like it's giving people a way to earn their living.

~~~
yason
I've never understood taxing of income, except that for the point of a taxing
bureau it's a very convenient spot to impose taxes.

Namely, taxing reduces whatever that is taxed. Taxing work makes work less
desirable, and sometimes not worth to be done at all. Taxes should target
things that are unnecessary or harming.

Thus, income shouldn't be taxed at all. Conversely, consumption should be
taxed with a VAT roughly equal to the lost income tax. Food could certainly be
taxed less than cars but the general rule should be that you're taxed for
consuming. Because income wouldn't be taxed, people's purchasing power would
increase but taxing the consumption would make them think twice where they
spend their money. Consider that this is the opposite of the current
situation: people are all pre-taxed (=license to consume) and items and
products are so cheap they can get spent money on and ultimately discarded
without anyone blinking an eye.

~~~
devs1010
we are taxed at consumption as well, I'm assuming you mean you want even
higher sales tax than we currently have but no income tax? I have felt that
the current sales tax of up to 10% in some places is already fairly high as is

~~~
lucaspiller
10%? Wow! Here in Ireland income tax is 20% on the first €32,000 and 40% above
that. VAT (sales tax) is at 23%.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Ireland's quite weird in terms of tax policy internationally. We have
supposedly low rates of income tax, high sales taxes and low corporate tax.
Ireland also has more deductible than I've seen in the UK. I went looking for
things I could use to reduce my tax bill (there's loads in Ireland), but there
appeared to be no comparable tax reliefs available for me in the UK :(.

~~~
devs1010
At those rates, income tax would also be higher than in the U.S., at least for
most people

------
eldavido
Whether a human being or a machine is doing a task, value is being created;
the overall economy isn't worse off.

The issue is value capture -- who derives the benefit of this value creation,
and how?

If a human being does a job, they're compensated through wages. Machines have
owners, which earn income in exchange for the productive output of their
machines.

There are a lot of ways to earn income besides having a job. The sooner people
realize this, the sooner we'll get beyond this absurd "job creation" mentality
around which so much of modern politics revolves.

------
ChristianMarks
_Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order
to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products._

The article doesn't mention Lanier's extensive writing on what he calls
Digital Maoism: the notion that collectives always solve problems better than
individuals, who should give their digital content away for free. If there
were some way of monetizing this digital content that did not benefit only a
few well-positioned social networking hubs and that did not require draconian
intellectual property legislation (which mainly benefits a few monopolists),
then there might be some hope.

~~~
marshray
Yeah was getting into the article until near the end when it started to feel
like a not-so-subtle defense of "intellectual property", i.e., "if only we
could better monetize our digital creations Utopia would be within reach".

I honestly feel that the way our government is run by lawyers (who seem to
actually believe in this silly idea of an IP-based economy) is the reason so
much manufacturing has fled the country. Americans today just don't know the
value of mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Germany and Switzerland
didn't make this mistake. They love and value manufacturing and look where
their economies are.

(And by the way kids, get off my lawn :-)

------
aseembehl
Captain Jean-Luc Picard states in the film Star Trek: First Contact that "The
economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in
the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in
our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

Disclaimer: Copied from the comments on the original article.

~~~
zerostar07
Generally, one ought to start thinking about _this_ instead of the "End of
jobs". Jobs are an industrial-era economic construction, work is something we
always had and will probably always have, even as an evolutionary relic.

------
ttt_
Somewhere out there there's a social model that makes a lot more sense and
just works, but we can't fathom it right now because we are so busy worrying
about competing over pieces on the ground.

~~~
mtrn
As a software engineer, I would love to see all the tedious tasks people do
all day replaced by technology. If having money is the only way to stay alive
and I had a job, I would even pay higher taxes, just to let people do more of
what they might love more (and what in the long run would benefit society in
other ways). -- I guess, that this opinion is diametrical to current ideology.

~~~
psb217
The word you want in that last sentence is "diametrical", or perhaps
"antipodal".

~~~
mtrn
English is not my native tongue, so thanks for the suggestion. (Now that you
mention it, I found both words in the dictionary.)

------
aurynn
Charlie Stross brought this idea up on his blog recently; what does a post
work-for-pay world look like? What would you do if you had a home, food, and
health care as a basic right?

Could we even get there with our current basic cultural value being that if
you don't work, you have no value?

~~~
Jare
Yes we could: replace 'work' with 'contribute' and it makes a lot of sense. I
wouldn't believe in the mid- and long-term viability of a society that
supports its members without requiring them to participate in its existence,
development and improvement. Without some form of obligation, it would
stagnate into a world of (so to speak) couch potatoes too easily.

If I had a home, food and health care as a basic right, what I would do? Raise
my child with undivided attention, care and love. Try to make his environment
a happy, safe and stimulating place. The kind of stuff that modern society
apparently considers optional, or not valuable at all.

~~~
femto
The last paragraph suggests a new organisation for a company: one where people
can job share high value jobs, in return for an average salary.

Here's an example. Let's say I am capable of earning $160,000 a year, if I
work 5 days a week in a role that is optimally suited to my skills. The
problem is that this role leaves me with little time for my family (or other
projects) and an excess of money. What I really want is to work 2 days a week
for a salary of $64,000.

The above is hard to do in the current employment system. The closest options
seem to be:

1) Take part time work. Typically part time work pays a much lower hourly
rate, so to get my $64,000, I'm having to work 5 days/week. No gain, only
pain.

2) Go into contracting. Fine for a single person, but too unstable with
dependents.

3) Work for some number of years, then quit for a number of years. Demolishes
the CV, making it hard to return to work, and leads to an unbalanced all or
nothing relationship with the family.

4) Doesn't seem to exist.

Option 4) might be a company that specialises in allowing high value people to
work limited hours, at what they do best. It would require a new way of
organising things.

a) Systems to eliminate the "fixed cost" of employing someone, allowing many
people to be employed in place of one, at the same cost.

b) Systems to allow multiple people to efficiently time share on a task.

c) Systems to allow people to rapidly pick up where they left off on a task.

d) Systems to allow a person to remain up to speed on a discipline, even with
restricted working hours (ie. reducing the fixed cost to the employee).

It would be interesting to see how such a company would go competing against
traditional a company of full-time employees. Assuming the negatives a)-d),
above, could be solved, the benefits would be:

i) A fresh, productive, low stress, "burn out free" workforce.

ii) With some flexability of hours by healthy workers, the elimination of
holes in the workforce, due sickness or unexpected events.

iii) The ability to very rapidly bring extra resources to bear (eg. some
people work 4 days/week) under special circumstances.

iv) A larger employment pool, by including people who would would normally be
precluded from full-time work. (How to make the model work well while not
eliminating those who want a full-time job.)

Points a)-d) would seem to be fodder for a start-up, which would dog food its
own system. The selling point could a competitive advantage, delivered by
points i)-iv).

EDIT: formatting + spelling

~~~
nradov
The problem with your proposal is that employee time does not scale down
linearly. There is a certain fixed amount of time needed for each employee to
do training and administration, whether that employee works part time or full
time. Let's say that takes 2 hours per week. If you drop from 40 hours per
week to 16 then your actual productive time is only 37% as much. Plus there is
additional fixed overhead for HR, computing resources, software licenses,
personal equipment, etc.

Also consider that adding more people to a team increases communication
overhead, regardless of whether they are part time or full time: n*(n-1)/2. So
there's a further loss of efficiency with replacing a small number of full
time workers with a larger number of part time workers.

~~~
devs1010
I agree, its simply not possible to do this effectively in many situations,
you can't just plug in a bunch of people for 2 days a week and expect to get
the same output as the equivalent number of hours worked from a team of full-
timers. I think companies could potentially adjust to this long-term, but
projects and tasks have to become much more modular. With most companies I've
worked with, their code base simply isn't set up for this sort of thing,
theres often a lot of wasted time because of lack of documentation,
refactoring that never was done, etc to where its often very hard to feel like
you're working at maximum efficiency so IMO it would be hard to work in this
sort of environment just 2 days a week, however on smaller scale projects,
where its just one dev working on a new project, I think it would be more
possible.

------
paraschopra
In 1900s, with Nietzsche, we killed God but at least people had distractions
of "work".

But in 2000s, we are slowly killing work itself and replacing it with
automaton.

Without a world with religion or necessary work, I wonder, what is there for
(majority of) humans to "cling to"? Without distractions, won't their
"freedom" drive them insane? Without God and profession, what would give
meaning to their life?

~~~
molsongolden
The State and war. Then once we abolish those we will have reached communist
nirvana.

------
mark_l_watson
I get into friendly arguments with family and friends on the conservative and
liberal side of things over this. While I believe that paying taxes partially
to support people who can't work or can't get jobs is simply part of the cost
of living in a (reasonable) civil society, I also believe that there has to be
a strong incentive built into the system.

I believe that able bodied people and their families who don't have means of
earning money should be supported in clean and safe tent cities and
incentivized to put effort into accepting and working with training programs
and education. Incentives might be things like cable TV, etc. in their
housing.

No one should starve to death or go hungry in our country. People who simply
don't want to work or accept training and education should get fewer perks in
life, but should still have enough to be happy if that is the lifestyle they
want.

All children should have good educational opportunities, including free meals
at school if they need them.

------
andr3w321
The idea of this has been around for a LONG time and is not a new one. I think
the term for this type of society is
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism> or a socialist utopia.

New jobs always pop up though. The problem with this logic is that because all
of today's jobs will likely be automated in the future you think everyone will
be unemployed, but in reality you just can't fathom what the jobs of the
future will look like. Can you imagine trying to describe to someone that
lives in 1900 your job description? You write code for a living? You're a
computer scientist? Wtf is that? They pay you to just sit there all day and
press buttons?

------
kamaal
Let us put it this way. As automation increases and there are cheaper and
greener ways to harness and use energy. What we are likely to see is change of
goals in life.

We may no longer strive for food, clothing and shelter. Many things may come
automatically. But we will have to still work to make a living for many things
like medicine, travel, vacations etc but the basic stuff may all come at
cheaper prices.

There will still be 'rich' and 'poor' people. People will pay for greater
things. The poor will no longer strive for basic survival, but they will have
to strive for luxury.

The whole point is the definition of poverty and luxury will change. And we
are likely to have better standards of living at the lowest levels.

~~~
jules
Funny that you include medicine in the list of luxury things you have to work
for. In a large part of the world that's the one thing you _don't_ have to
work for.

------
WalterBright
I think this is just hysterical nonsense. Remember, it used to be not that
long ago that 95% of the labor force worked on farms, and still famine was a
regular occurrence. Now only 1 or 2 percent work on the farms.

I can't imagine people running out of productive things to do. After all, can
making movies be automated? How about becoming a professional dancer or
athlete? Writing books? Building a custom car? Making art of any sort? Elder
care (a booming business as baby boomers age)? Research? Tutoring?

There have never been greater opportunities for productive work than now.

~~~
mcantelon
Largely due to globalization, nearly half of Americans are poor or low income.

[http://finance.yahoo.com/news/census-
shows-1-2-people-103940...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/census-
shows-1-2-people-103940568.html)

There is, of course, no shortage of productive work, but getting paid for that
productive work is another matter.

~~~
zeroonetwothree
This is just based on changing definitions of "poor" and "low-income". Wages
are still around all-time highs for every quintile.

~~~
mcantelon
I'm talking about real wages: the ability to buy food, transportation, and
shelter. A few decades ago a lot more people could do this without requiring
both spouses work and take on significant debt.

------
thaddeusmt
The abstraction of "jobs" from "the things we do to survive" is interesting.
The only things we "need" to do are reproduce, and find food and shelter
towards that end. It's crazy that we have blown past the struggle for survival
so far it's almost been forgotten, like the binary code under our lovely Ruby
scripts.

But we still feel the flutter of our primal fears for survival, even in the
abstraction, and fight to the death over increasingly excessive piles of
wealth, as if we might not "survive". And because we do that, in the global
picture not everyone DOES survive. If you are convinced you do not have enough
to survive, it's very hard to share.

Even worse, as our personal bar of "survival" continues to rise in this
abstract world, our frantic and instinctual struggle to "survive" is
apparently driving us towards an incredibly sad and ironic demise - if you
believe the headlines about nuclear war and global warming.

I agree with the article's idea that as technology takes care of more and more
basic needs we should move to "information-based products" to keep ourselves
busy and satisfied. We have to. All the world's billions can't have two cars
in the garage, but they can all have giant digital art and music collections.
(I guess we could do more recreation/sporting too, that's not a finite
resource.)

But it's another level of abstraction. How far can we get from our concrete
instincts for food and babies and still find sufficient meaning and purpose?

~~~
itmag
_But we still feel the flutter of our primal fears for survival, even in the
abstraction, and fight to the death over increasingly excessive piles of
wealth, as if we might not "survive". And because we do that, in the global
picture not everyone DOES survive. If you are convinced you do not have enough
to survive, it's very hard to share._

Are you familiar with the 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness? Sounds like you're
describing a negatively imprinted first circuit (or "bio-survival anxiety").

<http://theuniverseas.com/bio-survival>

------
jimmytucson
"Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked,
but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people
just worked for themselves."

I feel kinda stupid for saying this but I always thought people stopped
producing their own "stuff" when we really got the hang of money. In other
words, thanks to money, I can do one thing all day (and maybe get really good
at it!) instead of doing all the little separate things I need to do to
survive. And then I can exchange the fruits of that one thing for all the
other stuff I might need or want.

I appreciate this more now since I started learning how to write code. By my
second or third go at a script, I figure out how to factor out common
functions and reuse them. Good thing these lines of code aren't _laborers_
because what I'm essentially doing is firing all of them and replacing them
with a workhorse (a function or a subroutine) which will do all the work for
me, multiple times.

I guess I'm sort of brainwashed into thinking the efficiency gained by
factoring my code is more important than the livelihood of all those little
redundant lines I figured out a way to delete. But what this guy's saying
sounds too politically charged for me to be _fully persuaded_ by it. I'm like
88% persuaded by it but there's the nagging 12% saying, "He's got an agenda,
Jimmy. Don't listen to him!"

~~~
zeroonetwothree
This isn't true at all. Working "for" someone else goes back to the earliest
governments and religions. Corporations only took off much later, after the
end of mercantilism.

~~~
jimmytucson
Oh, alright. So, he's talking about "being employed by some organization",
rather than just "having a job" in general. The article definitely makes more
sense now.

I guess, maybe naively, I don't care as much about the arrangement between
employer and employee as I do about the apparent dark side of rapid efficiency
gains through specialization. I wanted him to say, "Hey, look, specialization
is awesome until we're so efficient we don't need all the humans we're giving
birth to!" But I'm slightly disappointed because I think I just read something
about how evil and oppressive corporations are.

------
josscrowcroft
I'm sure someone else picked up on this...

 _"New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses
ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles
rendering taxicab drivers obsolete."_

I wasn't aware that _"Google-controlled self-driving automobiles"_ was
rendering taxicab drivers obsolete any time in the near future... call me a
luddite, but we've probably got several decades of legal and social hurdles
before that even approaches being a reality.

~~~
parsnips
Or that toll booth collectors were a vast segment of our economy... These sort
of articles by this sort of author indicate, if anything, that our economy is
robust enough to produce such inane nonsense.

------
danielharan
"That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything
we need."

Really? We found a way to cure cancer and power our economy with clean energy?

~~~
read_wharf
We have enough to live as well as we've ever lived, which is pretty well.

There'll always be something more. Some day, when a sizable portion of
humanity lives to 115, we'll consider the genetic limit of 115 year life spans
to be as important as cancer is today.

------
yason
If we assume that old jobs lost to automation and efficiency are simply
replaced with new jobs, then how can we measure we are actually producing
something of relevance and actual utility with the new jobs?

For example, farming is pretty vital as work per se and it used to cover the
majority of people. But these days, if a percentage of people can do the
farming for everyone then what would constitute equally meaningful jobs for
the rest of the 99%? We basically need food, clothes, housing, and heating.
Then there are things that we "need" (but can do without) such as electricity,
plumbing, running water, etc. Some people would become artisans to produce
specialized goods or merchants to trade those goods. These are pretty quickly
and efficiently implemented with the current efficiency and if that was all,
we'd probably have employed few percent of the work force. What's there left
to do that would genuinely cover the rest 90% of the work force?

------
nodemaker
This was discussed before at

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2970007>

------
snambi
Yes, we are using less USPS for sending payments and letters. That is only one
aspect of USPS. People are shipping way more stuff than they do using USPS. A
lot of stuff that is bought in websites like eBay and amazon goes through
USPS. eCommerce is growing year over year, which means growth for USPS.

IMHO, USPS is more important now than ever.

------
evincarofautumn
“There is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720
kilocalories per person per day”…except that’s not how ecology works. When a
species is given a food surplus, its _population_ grows, not the quality of
life of its individuals. If you give your surplus food to an area that
supports 5,000 starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of them
will be around in the next generation to starve even more severely.

“Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with ‘career’ be
shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even
meaningful?” I’d like to think so. We are just as much competitive creatures
as collaborative ones, though, so in a world where needs are fulfilled
regardless of whether you _do_ anything, I fear people will have little
incentive or inspiration to create.

~~~
icandoitbetter

       If you give your surplus food to an area that supports 5,000
       starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of 
       them will be around in the next generation to starve even 
       more severely.
    

Not sure how well that applies to human societies. Poorer countries tend to
have a higher population growth because poor people have children so that they
can put them into labor. In developed societies, the general quality of life
is increasing while population growth is decreasing, something that
contradicts your assumption.

    
    
       so in a world where needs are fulfilled regardless of 
       whether you do anything, I fear people will have little  
       incentive or inspiration to create
    

That's a typical libertarian argument that borders on sadism (is producing
great creations more important than living comfortably?). It can also be
easily dismissed: Money is not the only incentive for producing art or
science. In fact it's far from the most important incentive. Are you saying
that important scientists or artists have produced their works merely in order
to fulfill material needs?

I wish I didn't have to care about making enough money to survive so that I
would have time to pursue my lofty research ideas.

------
dlikhten
Can the same argument not be used for the industrial revolution? The job of
the specialists was replaced by technology. The job of the orchestra in
theaters was replaced by audio recording/playback technology. And the list
goes on. Now it is no different, more automation.

The real problem is that we keep reproducing uncontrolably. The religiously
crazed keep pushing having tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM.
Furthermore, better medicine means more kids are surviving, so that means
population keeps growing. However with a growing population there is less and
less opportunity for each member to contribute to society. It's a cycle. We
need controlled population growth globally and an incredible education system.
There is simply no other way to go.

~~~
icandoitbetter

       The real problem is that we keep reproducing 
       uncontrolably. The religiously crazed keep pushing having 
       tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM.
    

That's only the main issue if you're wearing Reddit atheist goggles.
Population growth is steadily decreasing in developed countries. On the other
hand, automation _is_ becoming increasingly a problem and is partly
responsible for the increasing economic inequality we are facing - people with
access to the means of production have a lesser need for human labor,
resulting in the disempowerment of the middle class.

~~~
thebooktocome
Perhaps I also have Reddit atheist goggles on, but if the religiously crazed
have more children on average than the secular, at some point the number of
the former will outnumber the number of the latter.

And then, presumably, every near-democracy travels back in time one hundred
years.

~~~
paulhauggis
Not really because many atheists grew up in religious families.

------
noonespecial
Its getting harder to imagine us _not_ eventually splitting into Eloi and
Morlock.

------
jebblue
>> What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty
we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a
world that has already produced far too much stuff.

Sounds like a campaign speech writer for Obama. Regardless any other
analogies, everyone needs to pull their fair share unless they either already
have (elderly or injured or medically incapable) or have enough wealth to hire
those of us who are willing to pull our fair share.

In the latter case, workers don't need Union boss thugs to protect us from
you; we just need your respect.

------
forcefsck
It's funny how the recipe to fix the economy, that our current leaders are
pushing, is by trying to raise productivity and competitiveness, by giving
corporations the flexibility to increase working hours without extra
compensation for employees. Then raise the retirement age at 67 while
unemployment in under 30s is in a peak. Yeah, all those counter-intuitive
measures they keep preaching for on the media all the time.

Scarcity of a resource is the most profitable opportunity for those who own
it. Scarcity of jobs is an opportunity for profit to some people.

------
maxs
A relevant short sci-fi novel about robotics, economic and societal change
brought about from change in value of labor:

<http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

~~~
socrates1024
I love this novella. Also on Marshall Brain's site are a handful of
essays/articles on this topic, e.g.: <http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-
freedom.htm>

His suggestion is very simple: provide an annual stipend of about $25,000 to
each citizen.

------
olalonde
> The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now)

The US government is arguably going in the opposite direction of
libertarianism.

[http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/0...](http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/05/US-Government-Spending-vs-US-Government-Revenue.jpg)

> would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer.

I think most people don't want to let the poor "simply suffer". Libertarians
simply argue it shouldn't be government's role to help the poor.

------
ctdonath
He fails to note that wealth decays. It cannot be redistributed indefinitely.
Those who create wealth must have enough incentive to keep doing so to support
(voluntary or not) those who don't. Take away too much wealth from those who
created it and they'll stop creating more, and what wealth there is will be
consumed and/or squandered out of existence.

Note that, in the USA at least, federal government revenue never exceeds 20%
of GDP. Try taking more, and GDP declines - to wit, producers slow or stop.

~~~
jimmytucson
Yeah, I like this part:

"The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything
evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised."

Wow. Understatement? Volumes of economic thought have been written about why
communism doesn't work and he just kinda brushes it off like, "minor bug,
nbd".

~~~
ctdonath
Soon followed by _"We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human
rights."_

Obviously he never grew a significant fraction of his own food, or built his
own house. That I can do so by the proxy of writing software (to wit thinking
real hard) does not devalue them to the point that those who don't/won't
create food & shelter, or do something exchangeable therefor, can demand I
provide them with such necessities. Advocates of this "jobs are optional" meme
don't grasp, or won't admit, how little most people are willing to live on if
they can get it for zero effort and can be entertained indefinitely ... funny,
that sounds a lot like the "bread and circuses" stage of a civilization on the
brink of collapse.

Make them "rights"? Obvious discussions of "you have no right to compel me to
provide for you" aside... I've figured $10/day is a workable, albeit stark,
minimum "living income" (see <http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com> for the
mindset). Few indeed are incapable of earning $10/day and making that livable,
save only for lack of will. There is no need to declare a "right to food &
shelter" (manifested thru confiscation) when so little effort is needed.

But, as you note, he just tosses out the "human rights" premise as "nbd".
Never mind the 100,000,000 dead from prior attempts at the memes he proposes
as new.

When he grows half his own food, and builds his own home, and gives 90% of his
income to the state (just write a check to the treasury, nobody's stopping
him), then maybe he'll have standing. Methinks he won't hold those views if he
lived them a while.

------
meow
"And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy
just to keep market prices high."

is this true ? is it legal..

~~~
molsongolden
I can't find a quick source for the disposal of crops but the US does heavily
subsidize farmers to the tune of tens of billions per year.

------
dantheman
No.

