There is a presupposition in this article: The automated jobs will leave a vacuum. That is, routine jobs will be taken away with no other jobs to replace them.
What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1.
You only have to go back a little over 100 years to a time when agriculture accounted for over 50% of human labor. Now it's under 2%. Yet unemployment is still under 5%.
While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the 1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time. Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since the dawn of the industrial age.
75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of agricultural employment.
In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more engaging and fulfilling as well.
There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of the world moves on. People like to work.
Up until now, the people displaced from the jobs automated away have always been intelligent enough to offer utility beyond what automation can provide. But there's a tipping point when automation/machine intelligence exceeds humans at which point they offer no utility to employers of any kind. We haven't hit that point for the vast majority of workers, but the early indications are that we very well might.
But looking at the past as a predictor of the future is a very dangerous proposition. We saw that in 2008 when it came to the housing market. Sometimes now really is different from the past. And if we hit that tipping point, it will be much like the posited AI singularity. Vast swaths of humans will become surplus to the most efficient means of completing work. It's important to realize that the people who are talking about this issue as one we need to confront are envisioning a future that is fundamentally different from today or anything that has come before now and they're predicting that for a very specific reason. You can disagree with that reason, but you can't use previous examples of automation-displacing-jobs as a way to dismiss that thinking. Because what's being predicted is fundamentally different from what has already happened.
There's not much to learn from agriculture. People left farms for better jobs in factories. That's not a story of unemployment and displacement.
If a new source of jobs pops up that can employ 50% of the population at higher wages than they are currently earning, no one will complain about it (except maybe for the employers at their current jobs, but they will probably just buy the proverbial tractor).
Factory jobs started out being awful, and workers had to physically fight and die to get basic protections. Eventually we got a 40-hour work week, less child labor, etc.
Well it's still better than watching your family starve, sure. Reshaping our society to accommodate a lot of people who don't have to work (because machines are doing the work) is going to be a long and painful process.
Interesting :). Though, this sort of presupposes that the people whose jobs are automated away have the financial security in order to take the time necessary to create a new job/career.
I think a lot of people, in the U.S. at least, don’t have that level of financial security (plus the healthcare snafu).
What is financial security but the ability to afford to pay for one’s needs? Automation in farming has cut the price of calories, and perhaps too automation in other sectors will reduce the cost of living. Automation in medicine could be a big help for costs.
Unfortunately though, housing cannot be automated and that is very expensive. Though much of housing costs, at least for new builds, is from regulations and labor. Reduce regulations with better governance, and reduce labor with automation (3D printed houses?), and you’re on your way to part of a solution.
The true cost of housing is relatively flat across the developed world and especially the US. The actual cost is almost entirely a function of local politics.
We could have a flood of nice, brand new homes for $300k in Silicon Valley and nice older homes for $200k, in the same way a city like Tokyo or Houston does, if the people of California had not made the deliberate choice to pull up the ladder behind them.
You won't have brand new homes in $300k in SV because the land itself is worth more than that due to the heavy demand for housing in what is a comparatively small area, though you might get $300k condos in multi-story buildings if the zoning issues in the Bay Area are addressed.
Houston isn't a good example either. Houston has almost no zoning or building regulations, which was on ample display when entire neighborhoods flooded because developers weren't prevented from building houses in flood basins. (CA allows the construction of residential properties in floodplains, which are flat areas that might get flooded if flood control mechanisms fail. In Houston, houses were built in the flood control mechanism.)
There are also plenty of places in California where houses and residential units are being built. In LA, for example, several ten thousands of new residential units were built in the downtown/downtown-adjacent units in the past few years. In San Bernardino/Riverside counties, they still have housing stock available from the last building boom. It's not that the people of California pulled that ladder up; it's simply basic market forces: too many people want to live in the nice parts of California.
This idea that automation will free up others to perform "higher pursuits" (especially programming) seems completely wrong. The reason is that we have a tremendous shortage of programmers, at least in the largest cities but in a lot of smaller towns too. These jobs pay much more than truck driving or burger flipping. If people could do these jobs, they'd be paid tremendously more with better job prospects right now.
There's nothing stopping people from training to be programmers today and working as a spoiled or fortunate software engineer, just as I am today - nothing other than the challenges of training, the time required, their own interests and capabilities, and possibly unawareness of the opportunity. Maybe a few people would try programming if they suddenly had money and no need for a daily job, but they could also do it today.
YouTube and free SDKs, IDEs, and cheap servers are quite a democratizer.
But is it true to say that automation would fail to free up higher pursuits because there is a shortage of programmers? What would you be doing right now if there were no electricity?
The point I was trying to make is they could already be doing programming bc there are so many jobs and improving their lot in life but they aren't. Freeing up more people to do programming won't change the job equation. There are already openings to dev.
But the question is whether automation across all sectors would free up all kinds of pursuits, not just programming. Maybe that wasn't clear in my question, but that's what I was proposing.
It doesn't matter how cheap calories are if you do not have the income to purchase them.
If you like, change food to housing in my original comment. The point still stands: Higher minded pursuits require a level of safety and security to pursue. That level of safety and security does not exist if you do not have food security and housing security, and those things don't exist if you do not have an income.
This is why when economists blame lost aggregate jobs on automation they are being disingenuous. If the government thinks that there aren't enough jobs they can just raise the minimum wage and increase fiscal spending, creating jobs until there are.
There were similar claims made during the depression. It wasn't about automation then either - it was about wealth inequality and a lack of aggregate demand.
Roosevelt then spent and invested in infrastructure - building stuff like LAX - until the country returned to full employment.
> Ok so tell me more about how building LAX was "make work".
No, I'm asking if that's what you're proposing for the 21st century. What projects would you have be initiated that would fill the gap of some roughly 60% of unemployment, in the case of most cities on that map?
* Green energy infrastructure - wind/solar farms and the smart grids to support them
* Fixing roads, bridges and dams (all currently neglected).
* Building community centers and schools
* Caring for the elderly and infirm
There's a curiously high number of people who declare the jobs program that built LAX an obvious example of make work yet defend silicon vallley's silly startups and bitcoin mining (the purest example of make work) as "socially" useful merely because they were funded with private dollars.
I used to be pretty big on the UBI bandwagon but I've come back to Earth recently and the reason is pretty simple - while we certainly do not take advantage of the total sum of intellectual talent available today - we squander a huge amount of it to poverty and cultural isolation - even with global UBI and universal access to education there will never be a population where even the majority of people can do those jobs.
Tech is a bubble, and we dig ourselves in deep. But you don't need to go to the third world to find illiteracy and ignorance. You often don't need to go more than a few miles in any given direction to find entire populations of doomed people - they have no ambition, education, and most importantly no desire to ever have them. The smart ones leave, go to the big city, succeed in school and go to university and end up successful, but for every capable intellect there is often someone who just can't. Its no different than introversion vs extroversion - some people crave the new and different and some people crave consistency and pattern.
And we might like to think otherwise, but automation replaces the routine, not necessarily the physical. But a lot of people don't have the capacity for boundless creativity, in my experience it actually hurts some people to have to think outside the box that much. Like headache causing stress and frustration. They don't become scientists not because the opportunity is not available to them fiscally, but because they cannot think like that. At least not in a professional capacity with forty hours a week consistency.
I don't think we can eliminate that factor. And I think it is much larger than anyone who promotes UBI as leading to an era of scholars and scientists aplenty gives it credence for. Or for not recognizing that as a species we are barely evolved beyond animals that could only, at most, do simple tool manipulation and use. Who couldn't understand the concept of self. Asking for human brains to on average be innovative, imaginative, and capable of running in the highest states of consciousness we can reach on a near constant basis is asking too much of a lot of people.
It asks too much of me many days where I try to find something rote to do rather than face new problems that can get overwhelming, so from someone not on top of the brain potential spectrum, there is a reason why predatory repetitious skinner boxes work, why addiction is such a big problem, why people get stuck in their ways and why change is hard, and these aren't things we will ever eliminate from the species entirely without a serious investment in transhumanist innovation. These people will not become scholars, creatives, or thinkers.
That being said, I'm not convinced its even a problem. A lot of why people crave "meaning" in their lives is the fear of loss. Having a purpose gives you an anchor to always ensure you never go completely adrift from your life as it is. You can lose your job, home, etc but if you have a purpose and feel like you can do something it gives you the strength to keep fighting to survive.
With a UBI, the fight to survival pushed on pretty much everyone by capitalist economics as a means to spur growth changes fundamentally. I would be interested how societies pressure to have purpose and how we build our self worth would change with it.
What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1.
This might actually lead to a jobs explosion.