A possible explanation: You can’t have a IQ-70 person doing the work that needs IQ 130, but you can have it the other way round.
So maybe in the past many people were too smart for their jobs (because most things that needed to be done were stupid), and when those jobs were automated away, the smart people moved to do smarter things. This continued for some time… until all the smart people left the stupid jobs. Now when yet more stupid jobs are automated away, the remaining stupid people have nowhere to go.
In a story format:
There was a farmer with three sons—one was smart, one was average, one was stupid. At the beginning all three sons were needed to work on the farm, otherwise there would not be enough food for them to survive.
Then the farmer bought a machine, so only two sons were needed at the farm. The smartest son left the farm and became a scientist.
Then the farmer bought another machine, so only one son was needed at the farm. The average son left the farm and became a clerk.
The the farmer bought a third machine, so no sons were needed at the farm. The stupid son left the farm and became… unemployed, because he was too stupid to do anything else than farm work.
(Why did this happen now, and not during the previous years when the former sons were leaving?)
Also, maybe eventually the farmer finds another machine that does even better work, except he himself isn’t smart enough to run it. But his neighbor is, and eventually buys enough to buy the farmers land. Soon instead of hundreds of famers with their own machines, you have a dozen.
I’m not sure if the point I was making, such as it was, reduces down to the same “This leads to less people needed per machine, and the replaced people can’t easily go elsewhere,” or if there is a fundamental difference with the farmer not being able to pass on his land & occupation and no longer having a stake in the process.
So? Imagine yourself 500 years ago born in a peasant family. You work on the farm, you are tired and the work is boring. What will you do about that? You don’t have much choices. You can find yourself a cheap hobby, drink a lot of alcohol, try a career in crime, or join an army and probably die. Does the fact that you are bored like hell change the economy? No.
Even if a way out exists, people are not automatically strategic, so many will not find it. They may also stay on their place because of their social world, or because they are somehow convinced it is their duty, etc.
So? Imagine yourself 500 years ago born in a peasant family.
Then my IQ would have very likely been a lot lower than 130, because reasons. (It’s not like there weren’t any exceptions, but some of those didn’t die on the farm either.)
I don’t think it’s the number of jobs being automated away that matters, but the rate; unemployment becomes a problem when automation outpaces reemployment. Better or worse economic policies can move the rate of reemployment up or down, but as the rate of automation increases, the quality of governance required to make par rises with it.
Yeah, that’s a very good question. It could depend on the type of automation we’re talking about; that is, there may be a difference between technologies that make workers more efficient and technologies that actually make workers less necessary.
An industrial-revolution era textile factory was a far more efficient way to produce cloth and then clothing then people spinning and sewing by hand, but it was still very labor intensive. In the cities where the factories sprang up, it actually created a huge demand for labor in those cities (especially since the few countries at the time that had them could then export to the rest of the world), and that huge demand for labor then drives up wages in that specific city; this was the period where there was such great demand for jobs in cities that vast numbers of people moved to the cities. This is also what’s going on in places that are adopting industrial-revolution era technologies of labor-intensive mass production now, like China and India, a massive urbanization movement away from the countryside and to the better-paying factory jobs.
The kind of automation we’re doing in the first world now, though, doesn’t seem to create that same local demand for significant amounts of labor that pulled urban wages up in the industrial revolution. The car companies are producing more cars then ever, but they just don’t need nearly as many workers to do so as they used to. To an extreme, you get “lights-out factories” that can produce things without needing workers at all; there is a robot-producing factory in Japan now that is almost totally automated and can literally run for weeks producing industrial robots without human intervention. That kind of automation doesn’t produce local demand for labor anywhere, it just lowers demand for workers across the board, while increasing the pay-off involved from capital investments into automation.
Perhaps. Not necessarily, though. If you originally have job 1, job 2, and job 3 in your factory, and then you replace job 2 and job 3 with robots but keep people around to do job 1, the people doing job 1 haven’t really gotten any more efficient at it. The factory owner can continue to pay the people who do job 1 the same, and just pocket the difference between the capital investment of the robots and the wages he used to pay for job 2 and job 3.
(Now, technically, the way productivity is calculated by economists you would be correct, since it’s just based on “total production divided by number of workers”. That doesn’t actually mean that person A is more efficient at doing job 1, though, not in the sense that we usually mean.)
Again, why does this happen now and not during the last 300% of all jobs which were automated away?
A possible explanation: You can’t have a IQ-70 person doing the work that needs IQ 130, but you can have it the other way round.
So maybe in the past many people were too smart for their jobs (because most things that needed to be done were stupid), and when those jobs were automated away, the smart people moved to do smarter things. This continued for some time… until all the smart people left the stupid jobs. Now when yet more stupid jobs are automated away, the remaining stupid people have nowhere to go.
In a story format:
There was a farmer with three sons—one was smart, one was average, one was stupid. At the beginning all three sons were needed to work on the farm, otherwise there would not be enough food for them to survive.
Then the farmer bought a machine, so only two sons were needed at the farm. The smartest son left the farm and became a scientist.
Then the farmer bought another machine, so only one son was needed at the farm. The average son left the farm and became a clerk.
The the farmer bought a third machine, so no sons were needed at the farm. The stupid son left the farm and became… unemployed, because he was too stupid to do anything else than farm work.
(Why did this happen now, and not during the previous years when the former sons were leaving?)
Also, maybe eventually the farmer finds another machine that does even better work, except he himself isn’t smart enough to run it. But his neighbor is, and eventually buys enough to buy the farmers land. Soon instead of hundreds of famers with their own machines, you have a dozen.
Taking an analogy too literally, I think. :-P
I’m not sure if the point I was making, such as it was, reduces down to the same “This leads to less people needed per machine, and the replaced people can’t easily go elsewhere,” or if there is a fundamental difference with the farmer not being able to pass on his land & occupation and no longer having a stake in the process.
For a short while, but within a few hours at most I guess the IQ-130 person would get bored like hell and burn out.
So? Imagine yourself 500 years ago born in a peasant family. You work on the farm, you are tired and the work is boring. What will you do about that? You don’t have much choices. You can find yourself a cheap hobby, drink a lot of alcohol, try a career in crime, or join an army and probably die. Does the fact that you are bored like hell change the economy? No.
Even if a way out exists, people are not automatically strategic, so many will not find it. They may also stay on their place because of their social world, or because they are somehow convinced it is their duty, etc.
Then my IQ would have very likely been a lot lower than 130, because reasons. (It’s not like there weren’t any exceptions, but some of those didn’t die on the farm either.)
I don’t think it’s the number of jobs being automated away that matters, but the rate; unemployment becomes a problem when automation outpaces reemployment. Better or worse economic policies can move the rate of reemployment up or down, but as the rate of automation increases, the quality of governance required to make par rises with it.
Yeah, that’s a very good question. It could depend on the type of automation we’re talking about; that is, there may be a difference between technologies that make workers more efficient and technologies that actually make workers less necessary.
An industrial-revolution era textile factory was a far more efficient way to produce cloth and then clothing then people spinning and sewing by hand, but it was still very labor intensive. In the cities where the factories sprang up, it actually created a huge demand for labor in those cities (especially since the few countries at the time that had them could then export to the rest of the world), and that huge demand for labor then drives up wages in that specific city; this was the period where there was such great demand for jobs in cities that vast numbers of people moved to the cities. This is also what’s going on in places that are adopting industrial-revolution era technologies of labor-intensive mass production now, like China and India, a massive urbanization movement away from the countryside and to the better-paying factory jobs.
The kind of automation we’re doing in the first world now, though, doesn’t seem to create that same local demand for significant amounts of labor that pulled urban wages up in the industrial revolution. The car companies are producing more cars then ever, but they just don’t need nearly as many workers to do so as they used to. To an extreme, you get “lights-out factories” that can produce things without needing workers at all; there is a robot-producing factory in Japan now that is almost totally automated and can literally run for weeks producing industrial robots without human intervention. That kind of automation doesn’t produce local demand for labor anywhere, it just lowers demand for workers across the board, while increasing the pay-off involved from capital investments into automation.
Whoever remains after you fire all those made redundant has been made more efficient.
Perhaps. Not necessarily, though. If you originally have job 1, job 2, and job 3 in your factory, and then you replace job 2 and job 3 with robots but keep people around to do job 1, the people doing job 1 haven’t really gotten any more efficient at it. The factory owner can continue to pay the people who do job 1 the same, and just pocket the difference between the capital investment of the robots and the wages he used to pay for job 2 and job 3.
(Now, technically, the way productivity is calculated by economists you would be correct, since it’s just based on “total production divided by number of workers”. That doesn’t actually mean that person A is more efficient at doing job 1, though, not in the sense that we usually mean.)