It's not just the existence of technological unemployment, it's the pace of it. Over the past two centuries, we've shifted from an economy where virtually everyone is a farmer to an economy where hardly anyone is a farmer. We've mostly automated food production and distribution. But it took generations to do it.<p>Today, people embark on careers in their 20s that disappear in their 40s and 50s. Such a pace of change is distressing. Consider how many people drive trucks for a living. In another generation, that job will be 90% wiped out. It'll be local short hauls only, places where there's a lot of human interaction and judgment calls. Long haul semis will be entirely automated. It'll save money and it will save lives, and it will be a huge boon to everyone in society - except professional long haul truckers, who will lose their livelihoods. They won't take it well.<p>Given an opportunity and a mechanism to retrain or switch careers, people can do that. But what if it takes a year or more to retrain? How will they pay the mortgage? How will they feed the kids? People who can't care for themselves and their families feel weak, vulnerable, and ashamed. They'll be angry and act out. They'll listen to political demagogues who tell them what they want to hear and give them scapegoats to blame. Such a sudden social change is politically dangerous.
As I understand it (and I say this as a fellow "techno-optimist"), one of the most significant challenges is that cultural and political change occur much more slowly than technological change. So it's not that we <i>can't</i> adapt, but that adaptation is exceedingly painful to various segments of the population. We tend to accept certain facts as "permanently true", which ends up tearing holes in society and in our lives when these facts inevitably change. For example:<p><pre><code> * Building a long-term career at a single company is safe.
* Traditional college degrees are worth the monetary cost.
* Society can only function if everyone works a job.
</code></pre>
I'm a bit skeptical that "we'll always find a way to quickly replace jobs" will stand the test of time, especially when the primary evidence given is, "Well that's how it's worked out so far."
The idea of transemployment (work that is not needed, but is created to prevent unemployment) is a terrible idea. Have we really become so brainwashed that we have forgotten that the entire purpose of work is to create value?<p>Simply letting people not work doesn't remove incentives to perform: the incentives that we have are already broken. We don't live in a meritocratic economy: the Monsantos and Blackwaters of the world are rewarded for destructive behaviors, while advertising allows inferior products to drive superior products out of business. If we have enough surplus to support these massive inefficiencies, surely we can spare enough to support the unemployed.<p>Further, transemployment actually costs us. It requires infrastructure to create fake jobs.
Unemployment is not the problem. The problem is that the surplus / wealth created by technology is controlled by the 1%. Redistribute that wealth and the majority of the workforce will no longer need to be truck drivers, or farmers, or laborers. Then, we can start paying people to learn.
This is a <i>horrible</i> assessment of whether we are facing technological unemployment.<p><i>There are more bank tellers in the US than ever before</i><p>But.. there are more people than ever before. And the number of bank tellers is leveling off even as the population grows.<p><i>Overall, there is scant evidence that we are undergoing a technological-unemployment crisis, if only because unemployment rates are low.</i><p>Are you <i>kidding me</i>? (First, you have to always be careful with any metric where the collecting agent has even the slightest bias to the outcome. Unemployment is not the obvious number you might think it is for a variety of reasons.) Jobless and underemployment are the numbers you want to be looking at -- and good luck getting good numbers on those but when you do, I think they'll tell a very different story.
> Some authors fear that technology will result in a radical concentration of wealth, the like of which we have never seen… while a few people will be super wealthy, all of us will slowly starve. Except that fewer people than ever in history are starving!<p>Starving is how revolutions happen, so probably not literally starving. But poor people in the US are already wholly politically disenfranchised, and children of poor parents likely to be poor.<p>The two questions which are important to consider in the light of extreme automation: "how large and diverse is our oligarchy?" and "how much social and economic mobility is there between generations?".<p>We are well on the way to having a small oligarchy like Russia and mostly inherited wealth, at which point our society will simply cease to exist.
I would like to see a little more serious attention to the "participation" rates in the workforce. Author is a little too reliant, for this particular topic, on the 5% unemployment rate.
hmm -- his 'transemployment' concept where complex processes are created and assigned to people as 'jobs' is brutal. We've all worked at process-heavy orgs and most of us have left them.<p>Process-heavy orgs will get out-competed by orgs managed almost any other way. If you're optimized to create useless work for people, you'll probably lose to an org that's optimized for something almost as silly like optimizing for high cost of labor. My consultancy is optimized for high cost of labor and I do okay.<p>Some people argue this is what's happening to France now. 40 years of shaping labor law to improve retirement & reduce unemployment has taken its toll. Paris is a smart tech-savvy and beautiful city that could have been Europe's silicon valley, but you're not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week and you can't fire people. Ah, 20-20 hindsight.
"If human labor were to become wholly unnecessary, we are going to substitute for it through transemployment. That is, we will create work that is not strictly needed."<p>In other words, bullshit jobs:
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.o...</a><p>That's fine if employment becomes fully optional, but I fear we'll be forced into a life without the meaning of useful jobs, and without the freedom of technological unemployment.
I have often wondered what happens when large scale technological unemployment occurs, or even the threat of it. I think we have seen the result in the 2016 Presidential election with the election of Donald Trump, probably the least qualified president since Harding. He's a psychopath, for god's sake. And his cabinet is beyond comprehension.<p>The possible result is an attack on all branches of the executive except the military. Replacement of Social Security and Medicare by virtually worthless vouchers, elimination of the departments of Education, Housing, and Energy. emasculation of the EPA. And on and on.<p>This could be as self-destructive as an armed uprising with fewer deaths (maybe).<p>Many of the issues are easy to fix. Remove the wage cap on Social Security taxes. Convert to health insurance to Medicare. Some of the unemployment issues can be mitigated by making the workweek 30 or 32 hours. Turning truck drivers into nurses or medical technicians takes a few years of training. Many of them are smart enough to do it. The current stumbling block is that they must have income support during the education period. Giving someone $100K to manage the transition doesnt seem like much to me.<p>Fundamentally increased productivity and wealth should lead to more leisure and a better standard of living for everyone. Eventually everyone should get a minimum guaranteed income so they have time to pursue their education, raise families, be artists or novelists.<p>See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome</a> for an experiment on a guaranteed income.
Global economy & services may be fully automated pretty soon but local economies? No chance, we are still going to have humans doing local trades and services to other humans for the foreseeable future, just go back to your roots as a member of a family, village, community.
AI is a fundamentally different technological innovation than the ones he compares against in the post. It's not an incremental improvement on methods, it's a complete replacement of the labor force for many industries.<p>But the problem to solve isn't how to blunt the impact of AI, rather how to handle the newly freed labor force. I don't think this should be seen as a bad thing. Tasks a machine can take care of should be left to a machine, and other work should be handled by a human. We'll have a lot of open human capacity to accomplish something, but if the transition isn't handled well it could be really painful.
I used to think techno-optimists were delusional but history is on their side. You could argue there is a phase shift happening and this one will be different but I doubt it. Like the author says we'll make up new jobs.
The main thesis of this article is true but honestly the author has done a very unconvincing job to back it up. For example my problem is with his references: "Firm investments in high-tech equipment and software is falling"...whereas the liked article is about "The recent slowdown in high-tech equipment price declines and some implications for business investment and labor productivity"
> <i>[...] the unemployment rate worldwide is low. It is under 5% in the US [...]</i><p>I'm not sure how this is calculated. Do people employed part-time count as employed? How has that changed over time? The problems of the <i>precariat</i> include under-employment and being forced to hold undesirable jobs.