Technological Unemployment: The Real Reason This Elephant Ch

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I don't know that that's always the primary issue.

The most powerful tool IMHO is clear and persuasive cases that can be made for ideas. If you're a really sharp and incisive thinker the world needs you front and center in the public arena, or really wherever you can participate from, in aiding the dialog over public policy and guiding the narratives regarding emergent issues.

IMHO if you can't make a coherent case for something it won't matter who you vote in. Also in the US, for as much as I think some people in this thread may have a knee-jerk objection to my saying this, I'm going to say it anyway - there's no clear answer on which party to vote for to make things to better and to be even more provocative I'd also add that anyone who thinks they do have an easy answer to that is simply showing their own partisanship. You might be able to point to specific issues one party handles a little better than the other but neither is a panacea.

To make an argument however that's so well formulated, clearly defined, and tested against all of it's possible weak-points however is to put something out there that it's very difficult for anyone to say no to regardless of what party letters are attached to their names. Such ideas aren't going to come from politics, they come from thinkers and people who do their best to refine current situations down to what's important and who can articulate the core of those problems in a few sentences if necessary as well as their solutions.

voting as a solution to problems, it's like giving your responsability to someone else,
there's more power in what you do or don't do, people get upset when you() say you vote with your wallet not with the votingsystem, the same idea goes for technological solutions, more complications, more materialisation(materialism), more distantiation from responsabilities and on top of that a race for energies to substain all that outsourcing
-eg people used to talk with people, now your sim-card communicates with other sim-cards,


China may be far away but Foxconn is on our doorstep

I guess you did not bother to read the link I provided--or indeed the entirety of your own link to the Economist which made it clear that there are optimists and pessimists on this issue, that neither side can conclusively prove their case and that some careful planning around the coming changes is prudent.

The people who are raising alarms about this are not stupid or ignorant. On that evidence alone, I would think that it's unwise to dismiss their warnings with simplistic arguments about other, quite different eras of technological change and how they played out.

Also worth considering: not every western industrialized democracy has the level of social benefits that protects workers in the UK and that the UK may not have all of those benefits by the time the big changes in employment come about.

Ah, the old "obviously you didn't read information otherwise you'd agree with me" argument. One that follows an uncharitable misconstruing of my own, and this time coupled with a "look how reasonably and middle-ground I'm being".

Except, if you actually read my posts you'd be aware that my position is one of guarded optimism rather than blind faith. Your contention is that the descriptive phrase I used in a light-hearted manner was actually intended as damning condemnation, and nothing more.



A different era? It's been happening perpetually since the Industrial Revolution. Computerisation is an example that springs immediately to mind. Far from making a simplistic argument, I presented the essence of a nuanced and complex argument as a conversation point. To reiterate, when automation is partial, jobs tend to increase, not decrease. The only concern, therefore, is in those industries in which all tasks which can be completely automated.

The normal pattern with automation is that a specific role becomes obsolete, whilst another one is in greater demand - think typesetters vs graphic designers. As I pointed out, the relationship between automation and markets is dynamic, not static.



Something which will presumably change out of necessity should circumstances (and the electorate) decide - much as tends to happen when politicians start to kick political footballs. We cannot set policy against unknown futures, we can only respond with solutions to those problems which actually arise, in the context of the society that exists in that moment. Robotic job usurpation is the very definition of a bridge we'll cross should we get to it.

60 minutes just covered H1B visa workers displacing well paid American Tech workers last night.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/08/why-h ... -programs/
Trump said he would immediately end the H1B program.

I think the actual concern expressed is that a high percentage of jobs will be automated in many industries more or less simultaneously and few new "tend the machine" positions will result. The result may be many newly unemployed people and few opportunities for them regardless of their opportunity to retrain.


What would that change have been like if PageMaker and QuarkXPress had been able to create effective layouts without human operators?

Looking into my personal memory of the era you bring up as an example, It seems to me that a lot of professionals in the old trades such as strippers (the film and rubylith kind) and masters of the mechanical step and repeat machine found themselves out of work and unable to move on to eps files and direct to plate lithography. Most of the old typesetting and platemaking jobs were unionized. The new DTP and graphic design jobs were not unionized and were taken by recent college graduates and other young people. The older union guys were put to pasture early with not much hope of retaining their earning potential or way of life.

Hence the jocular comparison to Luddites.



When we can create hardware and/or software that can creatively interpret and fulfil the artistic needs of a client, that might become relevant. Again, we're back to partial vs total automation, with the latter being of far greater concern without widespread societal changes.



My understanding is that the ITU made the mistake of fighting to keep them employed as typesetters rather than pushing for them to be involved in the switch, retrained and retained. Either way, the result was a net gain in the number of employed persons, and new careers or retirement for practitioners of an obsolete trade.

It raises the point of how best to personally avoid potential redundancy due to machine labour, and one possible answer to seek accreditation and experience in a field that's not easily automated. I'd avoid a career in administration or Human Resources, for example, but be more optimistic about e.g. teaching or law enforcement.

I was listening to Sam Harris's Waking Up podcast today with Yuval Noah Harari and they touched on this topic around 45 minutes in. Sam talked about the Clydesdale's and Humans bit, Yuval brought up a very particular argument related to the debate that we're having right now. What he essentially said is that earlier innovations and automation were replacing physical labor, so the market shifted more to mental.



I have to agree with Yuval in that we won't need many fiction writers, movie makers, graphics designers, or artists. There will always be a group with elite-level functioning who will be on the top, deserve to be on the top, and other people simply won't be able to be in that fraction of a percent who can fund their lives in the arts and entertainment industries. Education? Odds are we'll be seeing an increased level of online education because the landed colleges are looking increasingly like a scam when the quality of education is much less of the tuition cost than the rock-climbing walls, spas, and resort features and when half the time when parents kids go in normal and come back nearly reverted to five-year-olds gibbering about intersectional politics and oppression, let alone saddled with debt and psychologically crippled in a way that they can't handle the realities of a workplace.

One thing Harris and Harari seemed to agree on - there would be an increasing class of unemployables, ie. people who are simply obsolete by their best efforts in any area because any high points they may have in whatever skill sets they particularly have would be something that a robot is already doing better so no employment for them.

On a side note with the term Luddite - I think I can come up with two reasons why we're not particularly wild about that getting thrown around a) UBI and similar ideas, as Adamantium suggested, are being championed by people who are very pro-innovation and automation, b) the implications seem to be synonymous with 'hatter'. We're giving examples of public figures who seem to be championing these causes, they're not lightweights nor are they dyed-in-the-wool labor union types. I'd like to think that as such there's a pattern of credibility emerging, not to say that the future is easy for anyone to predict, just that I think the argument for a very real and profound employment squeeze coming down the pipeline is looking a lot stronger than the argument for everything as usual.

After seeing the report, I have to support that policy.

what happens to the obsolete?

Listen to the podcast from 45:00 to 1:00:00. They discuss that as well.

John Ralston Saul, also on the honorable Luddites list:

I think the problem is this technologically induced growth stagnation isn't readily visible. My theory is that it is becomes hidden under the growth of private debt and asset bubbles. Government monetary policy targets full employment by encouraging the growth of private debt. You just have to think about it. If purchasing power (which largely dictates total GDP growth in countries like the US that no longer produce a trade surplus) is no longer growing through wage growth, the money being fed in to the system must be coming from somewhere else. The answer is people are spending themselves into debt buying lots of useless junk and this is helping to inflate the service sector and keep employment high.

The problem comes when the owner class which takes most of the income and loans it out expects to have their cake and eat it too. This is exactly what they do. They benefit when wage earners go into debt to spend more than their income provides, then they expect their debtors to be able to pay up at some point. As soon as they realize this isn't going to happen (because there has been no rise in actual wages), there is a major crisis. The owning class then blames the underclass for "spending beyond their means" even though this spending ironically benefited them! It's f*****g absurd.

Sorry if I'm digressing too far. My point is the economy seems to avert crisis by making lots of BS jobs that are ultimately founded on a private debt bubble. I think technological unemployment is real, but that it is simply "hidden" from our eyes by government and capital working in collusion to forge a path of least resistance. It's ultimately not a sustainable system though.

I don't think this is unique just to the US either. Even in a developing country like Turkey there is an astonishing amount of credit card debt.

I think you're saying almost exactly what Mark Blyth was on the topic, in a bit more detail though.

I started to understand economies running on frivolous purchasing and production as an actual economic theory rather than a byproduct when I came across this:

Steve Keen has created a computer model that simulates the relationship between debt and GDP. I don't really understand the details (it's very complicated and may have some flaws vis a vis being an exact replica of a real economy), but it is based on an economic theory developed by the economist Hyman Minsky.

I think there is a deeper connection to the problem of technological unemployment. It's actually more general than just the idea of robots replacing jobs. At the root is the fact that firms will always seek to increase profit by cutting costs. I a global sense, when everyone cuts costs, people are ultimately paid less. Old neoclassical theories thought this wasn't a problem because prices would be forced to fall and everything would balance out. The truth is in real economies, price deflation always seems to be coupled with unemployment. In reality, the thing that counteracts the naive assumption that prices will always be falling is the existence of lending and finance. Finance is supposed to pump profits back into circulation by lending/investment. The problem is the incentive to lend/invest goes away when the economy is not growing sufficiently. Thus there is no steady-state solution. There must be an expectation that GDP is always going up or the incentive to loan/invest dries up. I see this as a fundamental problem with capitalism.

So you would propose the Malthusian solution to technological unemployment? I think the problem is you don't understand how primitive tribal society operated. If one tribe lacked the resources to survive, they usually had no compunction regarding the invasion and pillaging of neighboring tribes resources. If survival is at stake, the culture will adopt to a point where the "non aggression principle" is basically moot. People will revert to the more primitive ways of tribal loyalty and aggression/xenophobia.