The most interesting question for me is what do we do if, as seems likely, automation and technological development produces an abundance of goods and leisure time.
I expect quite a lot of this within ten years.
For instance, there are about 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States, and there is a shortage of new drivers. Self-driving cars will probably launch in a few years. Self-driving trucks are sure to follow. That puts the truckers out of work.
Other goods-handling jobs are already being automated; for instance, there are fully-automated warehouses using automated storage & retrieval systems. If Amazon and FedEx aren’t working on universalizing this, they’re fools — and they’re not fools.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, hackers are delivering burritos by drone. And delivery robots have been used in closed environments such as hospitals for years and years.
There’s synergy here: automated warehouses + self-driving trucks + delivery robots → the Internet of physical goods. Stick a barcode on an arbitrary object and fill out a web form, and a robot comes and gets that object delivered anywhere accessible by road anywhere in the free world. Awesome for customers, manufacturers, and whoever owns the tech and gets paid for it. Not awesome for the workers in the whole swaths of industries being replaced.
As automation rises, the skill level needed to be economically productive rises too — and, as you mention, “the gains from capital massively outweighing the returns from labour”. Or rather, the rents accruing to the existing owners of infrastructure; without there necessarily being much avenue for new participation. Unless the Internet of physical goods has open standards and peering points, whoever runs it can lock everyone else out.
As automation rises, the skill level needed to be economically productive rises too
I’d argue survival today requires -less- skill than survival, say, three hundred years ago. I know exactly one person who possesses the knowledge to create a seine, and yet every single one of my great-great uncles and aunts possessed this knowledge, in a landlocked area several hundred miles from any substantial body of water—because sometimes that was the difference between eating and starving.
There’s a tendency of people to underestimate the level of skill, and overestimate the level of effort, required to live without modern technology. We live in a very unusual time, where it is possible to survive without any productive skills whatsoever; it isn’t even strictly necessary to be able to read and write, or do math.
Society today is a lot more complex, but that doesn’t necessarily mean -people- are.
I guess one needs to distinguish between ‘survival’ and being economically productive in one’s contemporary society. Maybe a 1700s farmer would be more able to survive than me, and maybe a hunter-gatherer would be even more able to survive—that isn’t the point. The point is that since the industrial revolution, one could participate in the wage economy and be rewarded quite well, even if the skills you had weren’t deemed particularly valuable by that wage economy.
This becomes even more clear if one looks at the 30-odd years since WWII. In Western countries, a manual worker with fairly low skills was a comfortable member of the middle class. Since the mid-70s we’ve seen a shift in inequality. A lot of the good jobs nowadays require college degrees. This trend seems likely to continue: take Apple. If a robot can make an iPad, they don’t need low-skilled manual workers, but they still need highly-skilled designers etc. The skill level needed to be economically productive has risen and looks set to continue to rise.
We live in a very unusual time, where it is possible to survive without any productive skills whatsoever
Not for the two billion people at the bottom, not really. They’re just invisible to a Westerner who doesn’t deliberately investigate the details of their misery. The occasional scandal over the conditions in third-world sweatshops, plantations, etc only underscores the framework of the situation; there wouldn’t be sweatshops if huge masses of people had alternatives to fighting for scraps from the West’s table.
Sweatshops pay higher than average wages. There are alternatives, the alternatives are worse.
Sweatshops don’t represent a deviation to the worse. They represent a deviation for the better. We look at them and see how bad people have things and get upset—and completely ignore how much worse things would be without them. You say these people are invisible, but the really invisible people are the people who the West never interacts with at all, and are significantly worse off for it. People who complain about sweatshops tick me off, because they never offer a real solution; their solutions are always “fair trade”, which is always about protectionist policies that ensure these people never get a fighting chance at those scraps from the West’s table.
Yes. My comments were addressing specifically Western concerns, because that is where fubarobfusco’s comment seemed to be coming from.
I expect quite a lot of this within ten years.
For instance, there are about 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States, and there is a shortage of new drivers. Self-driving cars will probably launch in a few years. Self-driving trucks are sure to follow. That puts the truckers out of work.
Other goods-handling jobs are already being automated; for instance, there are fully-automated warehouses using automated storage & retrieval systems. If Amazon and FedEx aren’t working on universalizing this, they’re fools — and they’re not fools.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, hackers are delivering burritos by drone. And delivery robots have been used in closed environments such as hospitals for years and years.
There’s synergy here: automated warehouses + self-driving trucks + delivery robots → the Internet of physical goods. Stick a barcode on an arbitrary object and fill out a web form, and a robot comes and gets that object delivered anywhere accessible by road anywhere in the free world. Awesome for customers, manufacturers, and whoever owns the tech and gets paid for it. Not awesome for the workers in the whole swaths of industries being replaced.
As automation rises, the skill level needed to be economically productive rises too — and, as you mention, “the gains from capital massively outweighing the returns from labour”. Or rather, the rents accruing to the existing owners of infrastructure; without there necessarily being much avenue for new participation. Unless the Internet of physical goods has open standards and peering points, whoever runs it can lock everyone else out.
I’d argue survival today requires -less- skill than survival, say, three hundred years ago. I know exactly one person who possesses the knowledge to create a seine, and yet every single one of my great-great uncles and aunts possessed this knowledge, in a landlocked area several hundred miles from any substantial body of water—because sometimes that was the difference between eating and starving.
There’s a tendency of people to underestimate the level of skill, and overestimate the level of effort, required to live without modern technology. We live in a very unusual time, where it is possible to survive without any productive skills whatsoever; it isn’t even strictly necessary to be able to read and write, or do math.
Society today is a lot more complex, but that doesn’t necessarily mean -people- are.
I guess one needs to distinguish between ‘survival’ and being economically productive in one’s contemporary society. Maybe a 1700s farmer would be more able to survive than me, and maybe a hunter-gatherer would be even more able to survive—that isn’t the point. The point is that since the industrial revolution, one could participate in the wage economy and be rewarded quite well, even if the skills you had weren’t deemed particularly valuable by that wage economy.
This becomes even more clear if one looks at the 30-odd years since WWII. In Western countries, a manual worker with fairly low skills was a comfortable member of the middle class. Since the mid-70s we’ve seen a shift in inequality. A lot of the good jobs nowadays require college degrees. This trend seems likely to continue: take Apple. If a robot can make an iPad, they don’t need low-skilled manual workers, but they still need highly-skilled designers etc. The skill level needed to be economically productive has risen and looks set to continue to rise.
Btw, completely agree with fubarobfusco.
Not for the two billion people at the bottom, not really. They’re just invisible to a Westerner who doesn’t deliberately investigate the details of their misery. The occasional scandal over the conditions in third-world sweatshops, plantations, etc only underscores the framework of the situation; there wouldn’t be sweatshops if huge masses of people had alternatives to fighting for scraps from the West’s table.
Sweatshops pay higher than average wages. There are alternatives, the alternatives are worse.
Sweatshops don’t represent a deviation to the worse. They represent a deviation for the better. We look at them and see how bad people have things and get upset—and completely ignore how much worse things would be without them. You say these people are invisible, but the really invisible people are the people who the West never interacts with at all, and are significantly worse off for it. People who complain about sweatshops tick me off, because they never offer a real solution; their solutions are always “fair trade”, which is always about protectionist policies that ensure these people never get a fighting chance at those scraps from the West’s table.
Yes. My comments were addressing specifically Western concerns, because that is where fubarobfusco’s comment seemed to be coming from.