Why hello my old friend, the Lump of Labor Fallacy![1] I get why people think this in theory. But they never seem to notice that we have been living in an age of untold abundance for quite a while.
From the perspective of anybody who grew up in a subsistence agriculture economy (which is the perspective of most people in human history), we developed-nations types live better than kings. And all the agriculture jobs are gone! From that viewpoint, none of us should need to work.
But we still mostly have jobs. Why? My take is that, as the Buddha said, desires are numberless. People find new things to want, and other people find ways to satisfy those needs. This will always happen.
Sure, it's possible that this time machines will actually eliminate all the jobs, and we'll live like the lillies of the field. But that has been failing to happen for the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. And people have been fearing machine-induced joblessness since the beginning. [2]
"But that has been failing to happen for the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. And people have been fearing machine-induced joblessness since the beginning."
What has actually happened is that as labor was replaced or reduced in one industry, jobs moved to others. The agricultural revolution reduced the cost of food, thereby reducing the amount of "money" that a human had to earn to survive. They could then be employed doing something else. During the industrial revolution more goods were produced cheaply, making them more affordable, and allowing more people to buy them. The industrial revolution increased production but still required people. Each innovation created a new opportunity that required people to do the work.
At each stage, we dealt with hierarchy of needs. Food. Clothing. Shelter.
The assumption made in the quote above is that there is an endless list of jobs, and that the fact that we've had 200 years without the end of society proves it. Analysis of the data, however, suggests that at each stage, the "revolution" has left less jobs available, and/or those jobs have paid lower salaries. The trend is that at some point in the future, human labor and, some time later, human thought will have such tiny value as to be worthless.
A robot or an AI will be vastly more cost effective than paying a slow moving, slow thinking organic entity that requires money in order to purchase proteins, carbohydrates and increasingly rare elements like phosphorus.
Just as for millennia, smart people have been attempting to fly, so too have smart people been attempting to eliminate humans from production. Why are we surprised, why do we deny, that they are succeeding?
The evidence is right here. Nobody here on HN is forming a startup to automate some aspect of our lives with the express goal that the labor saved be used to create new jobs. Nobody is saying "My start-up automates X so that the people who were paid to do X can get a new job doing Y". That last part is just not on anybody's radar. Does PG ask this in YC interviews: "And what will the people who are made unemployed by your new startup do?" No. So why are we surprised that the world is turning out exactly according to all our plans?
The article is correct and asks the right question: "The jobs are not coming back. What are we going to do about it?"
It is entirely possible to invent technology that both saves on labor costs and creates more jobs in aggregate. A historical example was the very thing the luddites protested: weaving machines that replaced expensive weavers with greater numbers of ultra-cheap immigrants.
Usability can make it so normal untrained people can do something that used to require expensive experts. It's also a kind of technology we can all agree on, and many of us work on it every day.
Why are you assuming all productivity increases are reducing labor needs? Look at your YC example: AirBnB's entire premise is to make use of capital that would otherwise go to waste (unused residential real estate). When you lower the cost of capital, you increase the value of complimentary labor. If nothing else, I'm sure it's boosted demand for the local housecleaners. Given how elastic vacationing is as a whole, the dollars saved by the travelers are almost certainly being shifted into other goods and services at the destination.
Nobody says it now. Nobody has said it at any point in the past, either. But here we are, all as busy as ever.
I look forward to seeing your data, but looking at historical workforce participation rates and average wealth suggests that the singularity has not quite happened yet.
Well, except for the unemployed people who're the starting point of this whole discussion.
Fundamentally, even if we can keep finding more jobs for people to do, is that what we want? We keep buying ever more frivolous and unnecessary trinkets, egged on by expensive marketing ('The perfect gift!'). Then when money is tighter, we remember that we can actually be quite happy without all that, and jobs that were sustained by producing cheap tat dry up.
At some point, the sum of human happiness must be increased by having more leisure time, not by inventing yet more economic activity. But our society is structured so that, if we reduce labour needs by 10%, 10% of the workforce are left with nothing to do, and the other 90% resent the 'scroungers'. You can see this in the 'makers vs. takers' rhetoric of some politicians.
What if we could, instead, share the available work out so that everyone did 10% less work? Obviously that would be very difficult, but it's something to aim for, as an alternative to the constant hunt for jobs.
I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say the current rise in unemployment might have something to do with the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. One triggered by a giant real estate bubble and financial "engineering" that was, at best, criminally negligent. And a current incomprehensible fashion for "austerity".
You've also created a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between massive unemployment and a spiral of consumerism. People can do other things with their time.
What's happening in food is a fine example. People are intentionally spending more money on slow food, on organic food, on local growth and production. That's creating a lot of jobs. And even better, a lot of entrepreneurs.
We aren't out of growth opportunities until we're out of problems. Education, the environment, entertainment, the arts, parks, public safety: all have problems that people want to fix. The solution to increasing wealth isn't to force people to work less; it's to find valuable things for everybody to do.
Food is an interesting case. People are, in a way, turning industrialism backwards - making a conscious choice to support economic 'inefficiency', in part because of the social problems we feel it has brought about. I'll have to think more about that kind of 'slow capitalism'.
I was of course playing devil's advocate to an extent. I agree with you that there's still plenty of important things to be done. I note, though, that most of the problems you list aren't going to be solved by cutting back and hoping to stimulate for-profit corporations. Market forces aren't going to fix the environment, for example.
Some people have proposed a 'green new deal', a major increase in government spending to tackle those kinds of problems and provide jobs. I'm not qualified to say whether that would work, and at the moment it seems to be politically impossible to even discuss.
I agree with you that many problems aren't currently fixable by existing markets, which is often why the problems are still problems. But a lot of environmental problems go away when you stop allowing negative externalities and treat them as market problems. Overfishing, for example, has a bunch of great examples of improvement. The same is true for pollution markets.
Positive externalities are harder to fix with markets. Improving society's level of education, for example, benefits everybody; it's not clear who to charge.
But I certainly agree that existing politics in the US makes it hard to solve any of these things. Or even admit that there are problems. I look forward to the pendulum swinging back toward sanity.
The singularity isn't profitable. The end-game for humans (distributed consciousness without death) is too equal all around to ever become a reality so long as greed rules us.
For a closer look at that endgame, and why it in fact would be very far from egalitarian, check out http://vimeo.com/54714736 ... Essentially, variable time perception is the key.
"human labor ... will have such tiny value as to be worthless"
Hairdressers. Here on HN there is the background assumption that face to face office work is useless and sitting at a desk at home works just as well. Its so entrenched that occasionally you'll get an ultra-extremist counterreaction that of course we all need to work in offices because no multiple office multinationals exist, or some such nonsense.
Anyway, Hairdressers. There's a large fraction of the population who like driving 30 minutes, waiting 30 more minutes, gossiping with the hair lady, and paying $30 for the privilege, and spending 30 minutes driving back home. And they call it relaxing and "spa like" and a privilege blah blah. Personally to show my HN street cred I do the equiv of work at home and spend 5 minutes with a buzz-cut thing and a #3 attachment every two weeks which means my Imperial hair is always between 3/8 and 1/2 inch long. But the world is full of people who wanna spend enormous amounts of their limited time and money for someone else to F around with their hair.
Ditto investment advisors (duh, just push the highest commission), Insurance salesman (duh, figure out the most they can spend, convince them to spend a little more, and be a data entry clerk), real estate (see insurance salesmen, but without the data entry skills). XXX personal services.
If you've ever read the HHGTTG the "B Ark" is not a current social commentary (well, mostly) its more a blueprint for the future. When I/everyone can no longer make money slinging code I'll probably be running my buzz cut hair trimmer with #3 attachment for a line of you goofballs going around the block, for $30 a piece and it'll take you 2 hours and you'll be just thrilled at the privilege of getting a genuine VLM haircut. And I'll take my dough and do equally stupid things like ask my life insurance salesman if I'm spending enough with him, followed by a nice $50 restaurant dinner cooked and served by genuine humans blah blah blah.
Sorry, but the B Ark was a satire on Thatcherism. It was supposed to show what a fucking stupid joke it would be to condemn 1/3 of the population as "useless" and kill them off.
"This will always happen." I am dubious. It seems a lot of econ people hold this notion with almost religious faith. And I may be mistaken in my doubting and you may be correct. But I wonder if a paradigm shift is on the horizon that will wash some old truths away for good.
I see new kinds of jobs being created all the time. For example, look at the explosive growth of the entertainment industry. How about the car customization industry? People pay a lot of money for personalized cars. The fashion industry. Comic book conventions are a big industry. Sports, sports equipment, trainers, etc. How about that minor industry to escort hundreds of amateurs up Mt. Everest each year?
The increasing wealth of society and the decreasing costs of food/shelter enable all these more frivolous demands.
> The increasing wealth of society and the decreasing costs of food/shelter enable all these more frivolous demands.
Where do you live? Real wages haven't changed, spending power has dropped significantly, and inflation has multipled quite a few fold the costs of basic goods over the last 30 years. At least in the US.
The inflation adjusted wage hasn't gone up. Housing and food have gotten tremendously more expensive due to land scarcity and the dramatic inefficiencies of housing and food distribution. We have superfluous tech advantages because they are untapped resources, like silicon transistors and graphene, but until we have automated farms, or skyscraper farms with artificial lighting, or molecular fabrication to such a degree that printers could print proteins and aminos, it is a real problem.
Land scarcity? Where do you live? The EU population density is something like 4x the US, admittedly we don't have inhospitable desert wastelands but there's a lot of space still left.
America has laws that restrict you from building dense European-style or Asian-style apartment buildings, effectively forcing everyone into quarter-acre land plots in the suburbs. This is actually considered a major driver of inefficiency and waste in the American economy.
While they have running water, electricity, lights, internet, all kinds of fresh food on demand, Health Care that actually works, all kinds of abundance like that.
Assuming we are talking about people living in a Developed nation.
GP probably meant effective medicine, not a 'health care system that is shiny and fair'.
If you measure historically, being able to buy a bottle of aspirin is some sort of miracle. Never mind vaccines, treatments for disease or antibiotics (many vaccines and antibiotics are more or less free).
The problem is that "shiny and fair" is linked to the "miracles". Vaccines mostly work to eliminate disease by means of herd immunity. If vaccines because an individualistic economic luxury-good, they will stop working and we will return to the dark days of mass plagues.
Meanwhile one of the wealthiest men ever to live is (one of the many people working towards) making sure that polio vaccines will not be necessary in the future. How bleak.
You replied sarcastically to someone that labeled access to effective medicine a problem of abundance. The fact that it is true seems a little relevant.
Compared to a subsistence agriculture economy? You must be kidding me. Good luck finding somebody tilling a few acres of land in sub-Saharan Africa who wouldn't instantly trade places with pretty much anybody in America.
Yes, people in the first world end up dissatisfied with what they've got. But that's my point. Desires are numberless.
It isn't that ALL of a fixed number of jobs are going away: that is not what the article is saying. it is saying that the need for good paying manual labor is changing faster than societies' ability to cope with it. Not only that, we are pretty much doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
Depends on what you're looking at. Look at the credits for modern films. These days they use more people, not fewer.
Or look at food. We've already figured out what a future of minimum-cost food looks like. There's a lot of growth in more human-intensive agriculture, production, and cooking. The best restaurants aren't the ones with the most automation.
Sure, if Strong AI Jesus ever descends from the clouds or comes up from the labs, some things may change. But maybe not. Humans are evolved to deal with other humans. They like doing it.
True, there are certainly jobs for skilled filmmakers , chefs etc.
But on the other hand there aren't any jobs for tellers at video rental stores (they are probably replaced by a lower number of software developers at netflix).
The difference is there was a rational reason to put people to work as capital and rational incentives were established to get people to work. What happens in a hypothetical when the only "numberless desires" unmet are those that are literally astronomical in scope due to abundance?
From the perspective of anybody who grew up in a subsistence agriculture economy (which is the perspective of most people in human history), we developed-nations types live better than kings. And all the agriculture jobs are gone! From that viewpoint, none of us should need to work.
But we still mostly have jobs. Why? My take is that, as the Buddha said, desires are numberless. People find new things to want, and other people find ways to satisfy those needs. This will always happen.
Sure, it's possible that this time machines will actually eliminate all the jobs, and we'll live like the lillies of the field. But that has been failing to happen for the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. And people have been fearing machine-induced joblessness since the beginning. [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labor_fallacy [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite