The problem is not technology.<p>The problem is that technology is being centralized by a few owners. A computer in every pocket, 3d printers and CNC machines are very near to us.<p>Companies grow bigger and bigger, not because they are more efficient, on the contrary, but because they could black mail society to sustain it. Too big too fail became the motto of the new era, banks and industry companies so inefficient with huge losses that nobody could touch it without breaking society itself.<p>Those companies had done well, who needs to make cars when you can take $50 billion by the government to speculate in the stock market? A stock market that is fueled by printing dollars by a central bank(inflating and raising taxes of millions people).<p>Don't make me started with software patents in order for a few to own all ideas.
Society is collapsing to sustain unproductive parasites.<p>It will have to get worse before it gets better.
That technology destroys more jobs than it creates can only be news to economists. Any one of us has put far more than one other person out of work by automating their data entry or analysis jobs.<p>This essay on four possible futures along the axes of scarcity and equality is highly relevant.<p><a href="http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/" rel="nofollow">http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/</a><p>Does a post-scarcity economy, the sort implied by democratizing production via 3D printers and cheap energy, necessarily imply a more equal society or can the rentier class find a way to extract profits via patents and intellectual property?<p>Conversely, if we end up constrained by natural resources — energy, feedstocks, labor, etc. — is it even possible to move to a more equal society?
While I didn't quite read this article (I skimmed), I talk (read argue) about this subject very often with some friends.<p>I think in the end, the inventor of a technology is somewhat responsible for figuring out what the people he/she will displace can do.<p>For example, if I'm about to put a whole industry out of work ('disrupt'ing it), I think it would be reasonably responsible for me to offer training or some kind of conversion for the workers of that industry (so they can use /license the tool I have made).
The only way to stay ahead of the curve is by constant self-improvement.<p>I feel in todays world many people are slow to realize that they need to get more technical. It's not like there isn't "jobs" or "work" that needs to be done, it's just smarter, more technical work, with no clear-cut answers due to the ever increasing amounts of data we can collect and process. Think about it like this: "Programming skills in 2010s are the Excel skills of the 1990s".
Hackers can solve this problem<p>- cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in businesses into small bite size chunks that can be done by masses of unskilled workers. This is purely a software task that hackers relish.<p>- training workers cheaply and effectively, khan academy/udacity/coursera style.The business model for this should not be charging students (an evil practice carried out by colleges) but instead charging businesses for access to those workers.<p>- decentralizing production. Making what is produced by large factories produceable in the home. 3d printers, home robots, and so on. These are also mostly software problems of controlling mechanical parts.<p>That there is joblessness is mostly because hackers are not thinking creatively and working hard enough. Help will not come from other segments of society, they are incapable of doing so because they lack the key skill of which we hackers are famous for - inventiveness.
Technology has destroyed jobs for hundreds of years. It means we as a species are continually releasing human labour resources to tackle newer, more exciting challenges.<p>The difficulty is transitioning these labour resources from tasks now mechanized, to new endeavours that society is interested in solving.
The answer to a complex system like the economy is never so simple. Technology, the shift from a productive to a finance, insurance and real estate economy, artificial interest rates, stock bubble, housing bubble, credit crises....<p>There are a lot of factors that contribute to fewer jobs. When it comes to technology, yes, technology destroys jobs. But never on a net bases. 100 years ago 40% of our economy worked in agriculture. Today it's less than 2%. Yet people aren't longing for the days of farming. Technology alone is not the culprit.
What's the problem exactly? Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years?<p>Productivity is the ratio of units of output per unit of input, where you can abstract input as being either capital or labor. Indeed, productivity continues to grow as a consequence of technological advances. When mankind started using oxes to plough fields, landworkers' productivity rose significantly. As we develop more tools to aid us in daily tasks, less labor - and sometimes even less capital - is required to perform those tasks.<p>During the relatively prosperous past decades, organizations have grown heavy, and were able to do so because of a continuously rising product demand. People started over-working and over-consuming. Then there was an external shock, media started talking about a financial crisis, people started being more considerate of their consumption in the face of job insecurity, and businesses that grew too heavy needed to get back into shape. This is a process that has significant feedback effects. The process of business getting back into shape means the cutting non-contributing jobs (think of excess layers of management), which by itself causes a growth in productivity. In this sense, employment growth and productivity growth can be negatively correlated, and it is not necessarily "technological advances" that drive productivity growth.<p>Telling us that technology is destroying our jobs is the same as telling us that China is stealing our jobs, though they may affect different industries (I don't see Chinese laborers replacing our butchers.) The thing is that the working population is very flexible, and despite offshoring certain jobs the average American still works over 50 hours a week. Population growth hasn't justified job growth in the US for the past 40 years, so perhaps a stagnant job growth is a good thing in that it draws things back to "normality".
Cheap interest rates are destroying jobs.<p>Artificially low interest rates == artificially high amount to spend on machine replacing labor == labor earnings go down as percentage of the economy.
While you cannot view technology as some kind of force of nature, immune to ethics, blaming the misery of joblessness on technology is beside the point.<p>When is the last time the minimum wage was raised? The last time the work week shortened? Those laws are in place because of technology eliminating human labor. Those legal changes were the solution to a problem technology created. But they have not been updated while technology is galloping away. We blithely crush low-skill, entry level jobs because they are easy to crush.<p>Technologists have a responsibility to mitigate the impact of technology. But the answer isn't to restrain technology. The answer is to deliver benefits to society as a whole, and that comes from restructuring our economy to benefit workers.
«In our own time, the development of technology and the growth of cities has brought man's alienation from nature to a breaking point. Western man finds himself confined to a largely synthetic urban enviroment, far removed physically from the land, his relationship to the natural world mediated by machines. Not only does he lack familiarity with how most of his goods are produced, but his foods bear only the faintest resemblence to the animals and plants from which they were derived. Boxed into a sanitized urban milieu (almost institutional in form and appearance), modern man is denied even a spectatorial role in the agricultural and industrial systems that satisfy his material needs. He is a pure consumer, an insensate receptacle. It would be cruel to say that he is disrespectful toward his natural; the fact is that he scarcely knows what ecology means or what his enviroment requires to remain in balance.»<p>— "Towards a Liberatory Technology", Lewis Herber [Murray Bookchin]