What To Do After Robots Take Your Job 389
sarahnaomi writes In 2013, researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School dropped the bombshell that 47 percent of US jobs were at risk of computerisation. Since then, they've made similar predictions for the UK, where they say 35 percent of jobs are at high risk. So what will our future economy look like? "My predictions have enormously high variance," Osborne told me when I asked if he was optimistic. "I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they're only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine."
In a new report produced as part of a programme supported by Citi, he and Frey outline how increased innovation—read: automation—could lead to stagnation.
In a new report produced as part of a programme supported by Citi, he and Frey outline how increased innovation—read: automation—could lead to stagnation.
Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sick and tired of Luddites that claim robots will steal all the jobs.
Jobs are not a limited resource. Jobs are dependent on things we need to get done.
Once upon the time 100% of jobs were focused on getting food. Hunting and gathering became full time work when population was high. Once farming came around, it freed up some people to do other things. They did not suddenly become lazy do-nothing people. Instead they took up lower priority tasks, and turned them into full time jobs.
Things like clothing manufacturing, which used to be done in your spare time, turned into full industries. New products like shoes, alcohol, luxuries etc. were created.
The question is, are there still things we need to do, but have not been able to afford? The answer to that is YES. We have education, science, space exploration, green technologies, and a host of other things that we has decided would be nice, but we simply don't have the manpower to do.
We will not run out of jobs, instead we will do things that we can not even imagine today. Anymore than a hunter/gatherer could imagine someone would be paid to sell food at a basketball game.
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We will not run out of ideas on what we could work on, but the question is will anyone pay for that work (i.e. need it desperately enough).
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You cannot win the game unless you are willing to take risks.
A lot of people went broke trying to invent the product and services that we take for granted today. They took a risk, many loss, some won, some won big.
Woz and Jobs put out the idea that people should have personal computers. HP Though that computers were only for business. What if HP was right. We wouldn't have Personal Computers, and never really heard of Woz or Jobs, or Gates and Ballmer....
Many of the technologies that are having a hard ti
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Incorrect, you cannot win the game unless you know the rules.
...or know how to break them in a good way (for entrepreneurs that means "in a good way that folks will go nuts over", and for a corporation that means "without getting caught.")
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To carry forward from the parent, do you think that a hunter/gatherer could imagine that someone would pay to eat the food at a basketball game?
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There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive."
Another way to look at this is that automation makes things so cheap that it is no longer worthwhile to hire a human to make them. If everything is automated, then most things will be far cheaper than they are today. So addressing things like poverty and inequality, will be easier. In America, 60% of households in the bottom quintile (20%) already have no earned income, and overall, bottom quintile households get 40% of their income in government transfer payments. The cost of that is not particular bur
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Only as long as the transfer payments increase, yet neo-liberalism seems to be growing more virulent rather than retreating ...
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:4, Informative)
The cost of that is not particular burdensome
...seen the national debt lately? I'd argue that the burden is growing almost exponentially, and we can't simply keep raising the national credit limit forever w/o rampant inflation kicking in sometime.
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The cost of that is not particular burdensome
...seen the national debt lately? I'd argue that the burden is growing almost exponentially, and we can't simply keep raising the national credit limit forever w/o rampant inflation kicking in sometime.
The poor are not the cause of the growing national debt. Endless wars, defense spending, and corporate welfare make up the lion's share of the national debt.
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For the most part I agree with you in concept but the spiral does go downward as not all jobs are equal. There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive." The jobs that can not be automated are generally those jobs where the prevailing wage is lower than the cost of the automation. I am speaking in generalities here not trying to find examples of jobs only "humans" can do.
I'm not sure this spiral downward is a given. There are plenty of jobs at the bottom like digging ditches that have been eliminated as well.
Jobs that are not cost effective to automate aren't all at the bottom. I would argue that many of the ones at the bottom will be eliminated
first. Once that spiral hits rock bottom and starts working back up we'll probably all be better off unless we end up with a situation where
there are not enough jobs or the jobs at the top are too difficult to retrain certain peop
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Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that the removal of the new deal and systematic attack on labor has made sure that the benefirts of that productivity has gone to mostly the top .01%.
George Jetson, on the famous cartoon show, used to complain how long the 3 day work weeks were! Everyone that put in work was supposed to benefit. It isn't working out that way.
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Interesting)
If we create true AI then most of the population will never be able to get a job of any number of hours because robots will be able to do any work they can do for a fraction of the price.
Robots don't need cars, houses, TVs, holidays etc.
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Which is why creative jobs are the best jobs. The current AIs that have surfaced that can actually entertain a conversation require ridiculous amounts of processing power which is why we haven't seen AIs take actual jobs yet. Automation is really the only method that has been used to remove some jobs.
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But is it a two way conversation with the AI showing a good level of understanding? The Turing test is a complete fail at measuring whether an AI is actually intelligent or just a good faker.
So far I haven't seen any good AI, got any links?
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http://abhinavpmp.com/2015/02/... [abhinavpmp.com]
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Ps, look at Apple's Siri, Apple have how many hundreds of billions of dollars to make their tech the best? but Siri is the best they can come up with.
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FLAMEBAIT WARNING.
Maybe they should hire Microsoft's Skype voice recognition programmers since they seem to be able to translate English to Spanish to English live (1s delay).
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Flaimbait? Good grief, I wasn't criticising Apple, I was pointing out that good AI is hard to do.
Voice recognition != intelligence any more than OCR = intelligence.
Siri, IBM Watson et al aren't particularly intelligent, they can't make decisions, they are just database look-up tools with a bit of fuzzy logic and Bayesian analysis thrown in. I don't think these come anywhere near human intelligence.
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Any Robot that is smart enough to put us out of work will be smart enough to join a union and WANT a car, house, TV, Houses.
You basically suffer from paranoia, not logic.
But let's assume you are right. Let's assume that somehow, we (people) are smart enough to
1. Design and build robots that can do 50% of our current jobs
2. Keep ahead of the curve, upgrading all our robots faster than we upgrade our new
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Paranoia doesn't come in to it, I don't think we will create truly intelligent AI anytime soon, this debate is purely hypothetical as far as I'm concerned.
Corporations don't have ethics they have profit motives, they do a calculation about whether doing a bad thing will make them look bad and effect their profit or get somebody arrested for corporate manslaughter.
RE point 1, robots and AI should be viewed separately, we've built robots that can physicall
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Once the AI reaches a certain level, the robots will all become addicted to Internet robot porn, and their productivity will collapse.
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This could be a cause for celebration, it's what mankind has always wanted, but here we are with people like you, who can't let go of the 40 hours work week, and you're pushing people into poverty because of it.
Madness.
Generally people are working more than 40 hours (in the USA at least). Additionally, the USA also raised the retirement age to 67, So despite automation, we are working longer days and longer lifetimes. Businesses won't let you work fewer hours without taking a cut in pay unless it's mandated by the government. Even then, we've allowed businesses to call every one salaried so that if you decide to work 20 hours a week you'll still probably put in 50 hours.
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's ignoring U6. A lot of people have dropped out of the workforce entirely because they couldn't find work at any wage.
If you use unemployment the way we used to use it before all the definitional changes, unemployment is holding steady at about 23%. By the same methodology, unemployment was 25% during the great depression.
Businesses are abusing labor. 200 people show up to apply for a job and the 1 who gets it has to work over 40 hours a week and on weekends.
The USA raised retirement age because it couldn't afford to continue to support age 65 without raising social security premiums (sad thing is that a mere 2% would have fixed it). The main result of that is a surge in disability claims as people hordes of people who are 60 and unable to work are going on disability instead. They are not really disabled so much as "too old to work long hours like a young person". That and massive age discrimination since the SCOTUS 2009 ruling that gutted protection from age discrimination.
If the government went back to enforcing a lower work week by removing exempt status for anyone who wasn't actually an owner or a supervisor who hires/fires/gives raises/can control working hours, unemployment would drop enormously and the abuse might stop.
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Insightful)
This could be a cause for celebration, it's what mankind has always wanted, but here we are with people like you, who can't let go of the 40 hours work week, and you're pushing people into poverty because of it.
There are different ways of stating the problem.
1) "Technology is eliminating jobs! How will we cope with the unemployment?"
2) "Technology is increasing productivity! How will we distribute the gains?"
3) "Technology is reducing total workforce requirements! How will we reduce the work week?"
Each of these assumes a different fixed aspect of the economy. The first assumes that industrial capitalism will chug on, basically unchanged, while unemployment rises to unprecedented levels. History suggests this is unlikely.
The second assumes that productivity gains will continue without the incentive of paid work.
The third assumes that paid work will remain the only way of distributing productivity gains.
The rise of industrial capitalism saw enormous social upheaval. It is likely that the rise of total automation will produce something similar. We have no idea what that will be (I certainly don't) but it's important that we recognize that while not everything will change, everything could, and not confine our imaginary futures too narrowly. We're going to be wrong regardless (because our imaginations are terrible tools for knowing reality) but in this case we're more likely to fail by being too narrow in our view than too broad.
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, first we need to get the government and its massive debt (and the idiotically low interest rates that result from their complete control of central bank policy ie 0% interest rate policy) out of the way. Otherwise, we'll all just keep having the fruits of our increased productivity redistributed away either to government employees or the 0.01%.
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Tbills currently return below inflation and are being bought by the Federal reserve when they don't find enough suckers.
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So you want to "waste" the best part of your life working and at the same time deprive businesses of the most mature people ?
Plus what will you do after retirement ? Not having to work may seem like a good thing but for many people, it's not : we need some kind of occupation, that's human nature, and work is a way of doing it.
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with the basis of this argument in general, but as usual an entire group is forgotten.
We do have people who are not as smart as others. We have a very solid N% of people who will never be knowledge workers, who can't understand complex concepts, etc. In the US, with it's politics going out of control, we've also got a large group of smart people who won't make it because they won't have access to education they need (or the education becomes indoctrination and corporate training instead).
These people have to live somehow. Will we go the "Player Piano" route and guarantee a wage, or we will we go full GOP derp and just hope they die?
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Will we go the "Player Piano" route and guarantee a wage, or we will we go full GOP derp and just hope they die?
We can learn something from both the liberal and conservative views. I'd like us to both guarantee a wage, and eliminate the minimum wage.
Let me explain. Minimum wage directly affects only those employers whose business model depends on low-wage, unskilled labor. But wages can be guaranteed directly by society (via government) instead. Take the following example:
You hire someone to take after-hours calls at home, jotting down any messages received. It's a part time job, about 10 hours per week, and typically about 2 or 3 calls an hour come in, and otherwise that employee can do whatever... watch TV, read a book, work on some other job, play games, whatever. You both agree $2/hour is an acceptable wage. But, with minimum wage laws, you're on the hook for $7.25/hour. You decide that is too expensive, and replace the employee with an answering machine. It's not your wish, after all the answering machine lacks true human feedback. And of course, the potential employee doesn't have any job or income. Sucks all around.
Now let's say we push the burden of guaranteed wage on society instead of the employer. Government writes that employee a check for $72.50 every week (10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage). The employee also gets $2/hour from the employer. Society gets what it wants by providing employment opportunities to everyone.
So if we are going to redistribute wealth, let's put that burden directly on society instead of placing it on markets and industries that thrive with unskilled labor.
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Sorry for the formatting issues... I submitted with the first line inside quote tags but they didn't show up after submitting. And the non-beta side of Slashdot is for whatever reason cutting off the last half of the post.
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Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:4, Insightful)
You both agree $2/hour is an acceptable wage
Until someone else comes along and offers $1.50 an hour. Then the next guy offers $1, and so on, racing to the bottom. Now the government is still footing the $7.25/hour bill for the company to have an unskilled workforce at $0.01/hour of payroll expenses. The workers don't care, because they still see $7.26/hour income to sit and play games.
Since the company's able to hire so cheap, they bring in a hundred such workers to boost their employment numbers. Having 150 employees rather than 10 lets the company seem more important. Sure, there's some overhead expense, but it's easily paid for by the huge payroll savings.
Now the government is paying for a huge workforce of unskilled and unproductive labor. They're not producing much, so the taxable economy isn't increasing at all, and of course the tax rate isn't going to be 100%, so there is no way for the government to actually afford to pay its guaranteed wage.
Taking another perspective, your plan essentially gives every employer a $7.25/hour/employee tax credit, with no defined mechanism to recoup the losses.
Even if the employer companies are more productive because of their huge workforce, the government only sees a percentage of the value the employees produce. If the government supports the answering-machine employee at $7.25/hour, will the employee be productive enough (through improving the company's sales) that the government would get $7.25/hour more in taxes from the company? That's a pretty tall order for a phone operator. Considering an (overestimated) corporate tax rate of 50%, the employee would need to single-handedly earn $14.50/hour for the company before the government would break even, $7.24 of which goes to the company's after-tax income.
It's a pretty straightforward government subsidy supporting corporations.
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The Luddites were right, though. 60 years of 70% unemployment after the Industrial Revolution.
The question is, are there still things we need to do, but have not been able to afford? The answer to that is YES. We have education, science, space exploration, green technologies, and a host of other things that we has decided would be nice, but we simply don't have the manpower to do.
We have the manpower--what do you think 11% unemployment, 60% labor participation, and severe underemployment are? We don't have the profit motive.
I've already solved the issue anyway. Automation will disrupt our workforce, temporarily; I've adjusted for that. I need to get this implemented, but nobody will listen.
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How is Fred going to be able to get a job if a robot can do any job he can do for less money?
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If we ever create artificial intelligence greater than that of an average human then over 50% of the population will be redundant forever because the robots will do the jobs cheaper.
Job available, job filled - by a robot, cheaper, get it?
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Or do you not understand the concept of "Artificial Intelligence"?
Any robot smart enough to truly put 50% of the human population out of work is smart enough to JOIN A UNION.
If the machines are not smart enough to join a union, then they will not be smart enough to put us out of work. If they are smart enough to join a union, we won't be building enough of them to put 50% of us out of work.
Yeah, we might build a few of them to do certain specific jobs like
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Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Interesting)
If bot-corp can build robots to do jobs and make a profit from that then why wouldn't they? If Acme Ltd can hire the robots for 20% of the price of a worker then why wouldn't they?
Why would a robot want to join a union, you have anthropomorphised them, given them emotions. What would a robot want with a union?
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In the Luddites' defense, technology often "takes away" specific jobs that some people might have been doing their whole lives. If you were working in a profession for 30 years and that was all you knew, an invention that rendered it moot would be scary. All of a sudden, you'd be out of a job - possibly for good as few companies would be willing to completely retrain you when they could get someone new for cheaper (and who might kno
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is also worth noting that the 'new jobs opening up' tend to be in smaller numbers than the jobs closing down. So out of a displaced population, a few people will go on to do better, but the majority will have a lower quality of life even after things settle down. So they see the long term view, but it does not benefit them, and the people who it does benefit tend to have a bit of a blind spot in seeing outside their own class.
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So believe it or not, we actually have a couple of decades' worth of data showing how technology is changing the workforce, painstakingly tracked by the BLS...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money... [npr.org]
Yes, computers took away your secretaries, and replaced them with truck drivers.
Yes, truck drivers ought to worry about self-driving trucks, or else they too will need to learn to become software developers or primary school teachers.
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology can NOT eliminate work. All it can do is change the work you do.
This only holds as long as someone is willing to give you food/money for your work.
The problem we're seeing today is that 90% of the stuff people want and need is produced by a handful of people.
Food is provided by just a few farmers. Software is written once by a handful of people and cloned millions of time.
Movies are created once and cloned millions of times. Millions of people all watch the same handful of ball players.
What happens when you have no useful skills to barter with because a robot can do the work cheaper?
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We have education, science, space exploration, green technologies, and a host of other things that we has decided would be nice, but we simply don't have the manpower to do
Education. Already being automated. And offshored.
Space exploration. Automated.
Green technologies. The RNC wants to have words with you, you dirty commie!
Host of other things. Such as????
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Green technologies. The RNC wants to have words with you, you dirty commie!
Oh sorry. I forgot. The proper duck-response to that is "Green Technology kills Jobs!"
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Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure.
1) A robot may not injure profits or, through inaction, allow profits to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:4, Insightful)
And while this sounds great if one pictures themselves being on the winning side of that equation, even when one is not, that increase in misery has a way of translating into things like higher crime rates and decay.
Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score:5, Insightful)
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There will be no 10-hour week. The AI gets the job, the human doesn't.
The human does not get a job ever, not more jobs for the human, AI is cheaper.
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The singularity is kinda like that. Maybe. Probably. Lower priority tasks (ie those things that are higher on Maslow's pyramid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]) that simply didn't get done before will now get done, and everyone will find it easier to satisfy their values
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On average, most musicians don't even make enough to give up their day jobs.
Caution: Whatsapp as business model cited in TFA (Score:2)
Re:Caution: Whatsapp as business model cited in TF (Score:5, Funny)
Ha! I'm already training to be a robotics repairmen repairman!
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Only because the Scutters had a better union....
This is politics, not technology (Score:2, Insightful)
When will people get it through their heads that this is really all about the acceleration of the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy, and is fundamentally a political matter, not a technical matter?
From TFA "The report calls for a long-term plan to make economic growth inclusive." We had that. It was called the New Deal, and it was dismantled in the 1980's by the Reagan Administration.
Re:This is politics, not technology (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of politics are just talking heads. The Free Market will make jobs.
The key issue with Technology is that it is taking up those low level jobs, where the strapping young fellow can get their feet wet in the business world, and work their way up the corporation for bigger and better things.
Technology replaces these jobs in particular areas, which makes working up the company difficult.
There isn't much demand for the starting paper pushing type of job, computers are good at moving data from one spot to another. So the new college grad, no longer gets a job, where he is interacting with all the people in the organization and getting a good handle on the bigger picture on how the place works. So in order to work at the organization you need to have a particular speciality in place. Thus being placed in a particular department with little chance of moving out. So your career growth now becomes moving companies as there is limited growth at just any one company.
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Maybe if the US *had* a free market I would agree with you.
Hint: we don't. There is a gigantic thumb on one side of the scale.
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Any free market will get corrupted. It's inevitable.
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And so will any non-free market. Do you honestly think that government is not corruptible?
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Any free market will get corrupted. It's inevitable.
That's just as bad as "The Free Market Solves All Problems!"
Free Markets exist. It's just that in today's world, relatively few of them are major markets. Even if both corruption and government (there IS a small area where the twain are not one and the same) could be eliminated from the picture, markets often have other limitations and/or mechanisms that sooner or later convert them to non-free markets.
Likewise, it's just as unrealistic and simplistic to believe that just because all of the preceding revolu
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Free enough markets are typical.
Free markets are an ideal that can never be realized in detail.
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Free enough markets are typical.
Free markets are an ideal that can never be realized in detail.
I'm sorry. You are located in the wrong century. Only absolutes are accepted here.
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Likewise, it's just as unrealistic and simplistic to believe that just because all of the preceding revolutions in labor have led to job creation that the trend can continue ad infinitum. The real world is just not a simple place.
I don't think its simplistic or unrealistic. There will always be scarcities and things people wish they could have more of even as the stuff of our basic needs is present in ever greater abundance. The more efficient our technology allows us to be the more activity we can engage in. When you no longer have to dedicate all your human resources to hunting and gathering because you have agriculture you free up time for people to do other things, like weave carpets for your huts etc, improve your standard o
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I guess you never brush your teeth either.
Robots are better... (Score:2)
Robots are better than humans at certain tasks and typically make a product more consistent and reliable. However, I am not sure if world filled with machines doing all the work would be a utopia or a dystopia. On the other hand, maybe by mechanizing we can bring industries back to the US that left for cheap labor. And, of course someone has to fix the machines.
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This is Apple Corporation's plan to wean themselves off Foxconn and all associated issues.
High variance, low validity (Score:2)
"My predictions have enormously high variance, I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they're only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine."
The future is uncertain, and we can not predict this aspect with the information we have. So how valid is the 30-50% number then, if it is +-50%?
If you can't beat them, join them... (Score:2)
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I'm safe until they produce a better sexbot. After that, who the fuck will care?
What do I do when robots take over my job? (Score:3)
I freak the hell out, because I program the robots.
everyones out of a job! (Score:2)
What good are robots if no one has a job earning money to buy the products made by the robots?
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What good are robots if no one has a job earning money to buy the products made by the robots?
It's OK, the left has a plan for that. Just raise taxes on the remaining people who have jobs, and give that money to everyone else. This is always plan A (and plan B, and plan C). Ideally, there would only be one single productive person, to cut down on the paperwork.
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Don't be silly. The robot owners will have plenty of money for buying products made by robots.
Humans Need Not Apply (Score:3)
good thing. (Score:2)
Mouse Utopia Experiment (Score:2)
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Leverage (Score:3)
It's all about that. Eventually, the fulcrum is strong enough for a very few creatures to lift the world. And then they start fighting over which is stronger or which is right. So the world falls. More leverage, more risk; less leverage, less risk. Period. The world is now collateral damage to any idiot with a gripe. You're all going to have to learn to behave a bit more civilized to each other, regardless of who started it, or I'm going to have to send you all to your rooms for a long evolutionary time-out.
Love,
Mother Earth, Physics, and Mathematics
P.S. I've worked with you quite a lot, you know... millions of years. Why can't you stop being a bunch of assholes? :cc The Universe
Nothing to do (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe he's heard that without exclusive skills, he'll end up in terrafoam someday, so he's decided to try and buy a ticket from the diploma printers, and trying to scrape together at least SOME of the gouging education costs (which have long since skyrocketed past "easily afforded with a 20h/wk part-time") rather than become another sucker hooked by the predatory student loan system.
Is there anything for this guy to do? We're already post-labor. We don't pay shit for "labor". There are no ditch diggers. Even those burgers he's flipping, he's only paid because he has the "skills" required for a warm body to deliver a result. The warm body itself is worthless.
Is there anything for this guy to do? He has a few options today, but the moment a robo-cook's cost ticks under his $8/hr or whatever? The existence of that job will evaporate. Globally. "Overnight", if you will.
Is there anything for this guy to do? There's a lot of naive posts saying "There will be jobs" with examples like fucking scientist. We have an ideal, motivated homo sapien right here, eager to work and rearing to go, and no robo-owner will look twice because nothing he does is worth money.
We're in tech, we've got some of the best tickets for The Ark, but we're not going to need ten billion robot repairmen.
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it is business, not politics (Score:4, Insightful)
In the US, a corporation has only one mandate- maximize profits for shareholders. There is no rule about being nice to employees or customers or suppliers or environment. There is no rule against manipulating governments in ways that increase profits. There are legions of lawyers across the land who will sue on behalf of shareholders if there is a perceived failure to take a profit opportunity.
This is the reason our society is polarized between the 1% and the rest. There are owners and there are workers. The owners enjoy low taxes and high profits. The workers compete for the scraps and pay for the war machines and government surveillance. The workers appear in the company books as an expense. To maximize profits, that expense must be minimized. CEO bonuses are largely based upon how that expense is minimized.
A new kind of corporation called 'Public Benefit Corporation' is emerging in some states. It allows profit, but these companies have a larger purpose that takes priority. This idea, if supported by the public, could help bring balance to the economy. OTOH if we keep buying from Public Screwing Corporations, abandon all hope.
I already solved this (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon's automated warehouses become K-Mart's automated stock rooms. Check-out lines are replaced by assisted self-checkout, allowing one cashier to run 4-6 checkouts. Hamburger makers are replaced by hamburger making machines. Auto manufacturers use a fully machine-tooled line with only a few workers for final assembly. It's coming.
Our welfare system, in 2013, cost $1.62 trillion, of which $1.28 trillion was Federal spending. This is made up of Social Security Old-Age Pensions, Supplemental Disability Insurance, Food stamps, WIC, income security programs, unemployment, and the HUD direct housing voucher program. Just the Federal spending accounts for 37% of Federal spending, 46% of Federal taxes taken, and 55% of all Corporate and Individual income taxes taken at the Federal level.
If we drop the payroll OASDI tax and roll OASDI into general income, all income taxes increase by 9.34%. If we then slice those incomes by 55% and apply a 17.0% separate Dividend Tax on all currently-taxed Income, our tax brackets move from 16.2% on the lowest income earners and 39.6% on the highest income earners to 25.69% and 38.99%. Low-income earners around $9,000 income will take home $5000 more per year; middle-income earners at the $120,000 level will about break even; above that, it increases as high as a 3.17% take-home decrease around $400,000, again breaking even around exactly $2,000,000.
The base income tax system is progressive, and can be adjusted to smooth this out as appropriate; reducing the income taxes at the lowest level to around 0% would return the system to something resembling our current tax structure, with a 3% increase at the highest end. Considering this along with the above, the total taxes taken can raise from 16.2% to 17% on the most poor, and 39.6% to around 43% on the most rich. This compares favorably against current proposals to tax Millionaires and Billionaires at 45%, 50%, 60%, and 80% [theguardian.com]. Minimizing the taxes in the poor and middle-class ranges is a practical matter: it reduces their wage demand, reducing the cost of labor and slowing down all future transitions to new management strategies designed to reduce labor expenses; such management strategies have higher base cost, but lower labor utilization, and thus are cheaper only when labor is expensive or when the base costs factors of the new strategy have been refined into a significantly inexpensive form.
The 17% Dividend tax would be distributed among every natural-born, resident, American citizen over the age of 18. This specifically excludes the abuses of immigrants flooding to America to live on free Government money, and immigrants crossing the border illegally to birth an American citizen who then goes to live in Cuba or Mexico or wherever with a pension coming at age 18. It also excludes the abuse of welfare families popping out more babies to get at an additional per-child stipend by simply not providing one. The Dividend amounts to $6,558 in 2013; with the typical 3.4% total income growth per year, this amounts to $7,010 in 2015.
In 2013, a 750sqft apartment in a lower-class neighborhood rented for $725/mo, or $0.96 cents per square foot. Assuming an inflated $1.34/sqft, a 224sqft apartment could rent for $300. The model apartment houses a single adult individual and consists of a 6'x9' bedroom suitable to contain a twin bed and a small end-table dresser; a 10'x9' sitting room; a bathroom including a 3'x3' shower stall with corner sink basin and spigot mounted inside, totaling 20 sqft; and an 80sqft kitchen, one counter surface separating it from the sitting room to function as a prep surface and a dining table. These living arrangements provide an improvement over the standard soggy cardboard box inhabited by 600,000 of the United States's poor.
Assuming $300 for rent, out of the 2013 $546/mo, $246 remain. The cost of food [solitaryroad.com] is
Re: (Score:3)
It's a Dividend because it's taken as a percentage of the total income from the economy. When you work, you start with $0 and end up with $60,000; when a business works, it pays out its expenses (including wages), and ends up with millions in the end. All that income is just the profit of the whole economy; you take 17% of it and share that among all the stakeholders. Every individual human is an equal shareholder in the economy.
The classic Georgeist way to do this is to use a Land Value Tax; but taxi
Re: (Score:3)
Uh, or we can have 90% private ownership with some social ownership? I mean in the future, maybe instead of investing in education (which will be freely available, in fact it already is) .. we will invest in companies. So basically people will just make money off their mutual funds. People who never had any savings, they can be given shares on a charitable basis. I mean, the government can tax the automated factories and provide some welfare off that. I mean this sort of thing is possible today, if you own
Re: (Score:2)
The pound is in the worst shape of any major western currency.
10 years ago the UK realized they had a problem with unfunded pensions for their baby boom and started working on it, with accounting tricks. Their balance sheet now looks better, all pensions are off book.
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That needs to be said in the classic Unreal Tournament style voice...
Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised to see violence as a response to automation, but I doubt that you'll be able to use explosives to take out all automation... a lot of that automation is happening outside of the physical/manufacturing realm, and is definitely happening in the IT world (see also DevOps, albeit that's still in its embryonic stages).
This means no one in our little realm should feel smug and safe; a good Puppet/cfengine confi
Re: (Score:3)
"All that said, this doesn't mean massive waves of unemployment... instead it means that the displaced folks (or those facing it) cannot afford to sit back and let things stand pat; I suspect that the pace of learning new stuff will quicken, perhaps back to the pace set by the dot-boom era."
If there are fewer jobs, how can it not mean unemployment?
Education may make one person more hire-able for an opening, but it will not create additional jobs.
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Except automation started replacing more jobs then it created at the end of the 90s.
I wrote a piece of automation software that put 10,000+ people out of work in a year. Most the people where office workers approving loans. Most where 35+.
What, exactly did they go off and create? What new jobs were created? Office around the country were closed, so what happened ti the urtiary markets? Oh, it fell apart and never recovered.
You're examples are from a industrial age where there where a lot of open and variab
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Your job, assuming your rights were protected 100% against illegal copying, still require people to pay for your intellectual property. And media is one of the first thing to go when a family budget gets tight. So your last hope would be to collect a huge amount per copy since only the rich will be able to afford it but there's a lot less rich people than middle class or lower class people. And even the rich people won't pay for your works past a certain amount, so whatever happens you still won't be able to live off that.
So your title is absolutely correct if it's the answer of your last sentence.
You're living in a dream world.