On the subject of robotics supplanting human toil, Ray Kurzweil recently said:<p>"In my view, it will lead to richer lives, and longer lives, but I would put an emphasis on the richer part. And I’m not just talking about financial riches. Life is getting [better] as we enrich our lives with technology. You can see that now—a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more information and human knowledge than the president of the United States did 15 years ago. People were lucky if they could get a book 100 years ago. We’re going to continue that expansion. Music is going to be richer. We’re going to have virtual reality experiences we can enjoy. All different forms of human expression, art, science, are going to become expanded, by expanding our intelligence."
Source: <a href="http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/14/how-nanobots-will-help-the-immune-system-and-why-well-be-much-smarter-thanks-to-machines-2/" rel="nofollow">http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/14/how-nanobots-will-help-th...</a><p>He's infinitely more intelligent than me, but I fail to comprehend how a world without human labour could possibly lead to a richer experience.
So then there is the question Marx posted a century and a half ago - what do capitalists do with the money they make? Only so much can be spent on mansions, and even that is an investment. They can bury some precious metals in the backyard if they want. But then the rest of it will all go to capital spending.<p>What is the result of capital spending? More commodities. But who will buy the commodities? Workers. But they can't afford them, they just lost a round in the capital/labor fight. So kick the can down the road, have the workers go into debt to buy the commodities. That works for a little while, but then the problem becomes worse and a bigger collapse will happen at the next crisis.<p>Despite just coming out of the "worst recession since the Great Depression", the Federal Reserve etc. did save the US economy for now. I'm of the belief that sooner or later the world economy is going to hit the skids and even Keynesian New Deal measures won't bring things out of it. Only time will tell of course.
Marx predicted it long time ago.<p>"According to Marxist analysis, class conflict within capitalism arises due to intensifying contradictions between highly-productive mechanized and socialized production performed by the proletariat, and private ownership and private appropriation of the surplus product in the form of surplus value (profit) by a small minority of private owners called the bourgeoisie."<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism</a>
People can only buy so many things, particularly people who aren't rich. The more robots that make our things, the less labor is needed, and the less things we can buy.<p>As long as we're focused on individual consumers buying things for themselves, there will be fewer and fewer jobs available or needed to make those things. While it may happen elsewhere, I'm very pessimistic about anything like a basic income happening in America.<p>But without basic income or a job, there's no effective mechanism to distribute cash. You need a job to receive cash.<p>Yet there could be many jobs available if we shifted the focus of our consumption from individual needs, and put some of that focus into community needs. Large projects. Infrastructure improvement and operation. Solar power. Transportation.<p>Just get it into our mindset that we're building and operating big stuff. Because providing for our individual needs will not provide jobs for most of us.
I just want to point out that Marxism was started as a response to the Industrial Revolution. [1]<p>If you guys think that machines are going to decrease our standard of living-- that the separation of (production value)/wages is going to cause poverty-- you have to prove to me that the same thing happened during the Industrial Revolution.<p>[1] Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist
This is going to get drastically worse, as capital becomes able to remove most human labor from the production equation using robotics in the next few decades.<p>I've yet to see a solution to the seemingly inevitable outcome of traditional human labor dropping to nearly zero value. And or why we'd want to prevent it from happening, given the upside to robotics.<p>The only way to stop (slow down?) the rise of robotics, is to place arbitrary restrictions on machines to hamper their value proposition. I expect politicians all over the world to begin attempting this before another decade goes by.<p>Will we see a dramatic increase in the formation of unions as a defensive response? Most likely.
What I don't understand is why humans are so obsessed with labor. Robots are doing stuff for us, and some people are actually complaining about it. To me, this seems really sad. It's like they're saying "I'm so worthless, I can't even compete with a robot."<p>Maybe that's true for some people. If so, then the problem isn't robots, the problem is that there are people who are less useful than robots. For a human to survive in the era of intelligent machines, he/she needs to have unique skills that are not possessed by robots. If they don't have those skills, they need to find them.<p>For those in the tech industry, those skills are already there. It will be decades, or longer, until we can automate software/hardware engineers. Entrepreneurship is another unique skill that will be even harder to automate. I believe that once machines are capable of conceiving, starting, and operating businesses, they will no longer be called machines.<p>What we must never forget is that humans aren't intrinsically special. We just happen to be the most capable organisms on the planet right now. The current rate of technological progression suggests that this will eventually change. When it does, we'll need to adapt or we'll go extinct.<p>If we cannot adapt to this reality, we will simply end up serving as the spawning ground for a new species (biological or otherwise) that will make humans obsolete. If we survive, it will be as little but a historical curiosity.<p>To adapt, we cannot look at robotics and automation as an enemy. It IS the future - we need to accept it, exploit it, and ultimately incorporate it into ourselves.
Articles like this tend to get lost in our desire to fit the world into our favorite grand philosophyy (philosophical framework, ideology, metanarrative - take your pick.) Since these philosophies are so ambitious, they need to deal in very big concepts like imports or automation-technology. The counter points are equally abstract. Each comes with its own vocabulary like labour/capital (being used similarly here to the Marxist workers/means of production).<p>I don't have a general problem with big abstract theories. They can be useful. They can also be blinding. Worse, they can lodge themselves as a person's political identity. Realistically, they are very imperfect and we should probably use a bunch simultaneously to try an understand a trend like this one.<p>Here's an alternative vocabulary that IMO is relevant inasmuch as economic growth takes the form of of new technological product (smartphones, internet). Who/how many get to consume the new products. IE, airlines get invented. How many people get to use them? Personal vehicles proliferate. How many people get to own one.<p>From that perspective, a lot of recent growth is remarkably equitable. Cellular phones penetrated right down the worldwide income ladder. In 10-20 years they outpaced earlier technologies like cars & electricity. Now most of the world gets to use them. PCs, the internet & smartphones are available to most of the lower income people in above medium income countries. I would say that overall, the common person gets more access to new consumer technology than a decade ago.<p>Another framework I would like to see used would focus on freedom to make choices, specifically lifestyle choices. How many people choose to take a different job, change careers, work less, etc. I'm not sure how one would go about quantifying this.<p>I'm not saying this should be the primary method of looking at the economy. I am saying is that if using different frameworks leads you to different conclusions, be suspicious of all of them.
It seems silly to discuss changing shares of a whole output of a national economy devoted to labor rather than capital expenditures, without an even greater emphasis on increases in the overall national output. After all, I could just as well argue that all around the world, men are losing out to women, as more equality of rights is achieved. But what's really happening (thanks in no small part to steady economic growth all around the world) is that both men and women have more choices in lifestyle and family roles than ever before. Today's laborers are for the most part vastly better off than they were in the year of my birth, and they have every expectation of becoming still better off as the years go by, all around the world.
If, thanks to technology, 10% of people are able to produce all the goods, 90% won't get paid. With most people not having money, only 10% of goods will be needed from that point on. And thanks to the new technology, only 1% of people will be able to produce that. Which means only 1% will have money. Thus, less goods would be needed. And so on. The cycle ends when the last human being dies of hunger.<p>Options:<p>1. Ban the technology, Amish-style
2. Cut working hours
3. Introduce some new kind of re-distribution, such as basic income
The problem as I see it right now is that capital-holders are treated very well because capital can slip through borders, while labour is a bit more tricky, because it comes with the implication of having an extra person around...<p>In an open border world, the balance would be more equalized, but that is more theoretical than practical at this point.<p>The recent rounds of QE are a great example of this. Those were basically made to inflate asset prices for capital-holders, because economic policymakers are conditioned to placate capital. Case in point: 90% of shares in public markets are owned by 10% of Americans. The hope was that some of this benefit would trickle down, as the infamous term goes---unfortunately that hasn't happened, so far.<p>So now we live in unequal times not seen in America since the late 20s.<p>pre bust: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html?pag...</a><p>post bust: <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/income-inequality-enemy-economic-growth-robert-reich-142150436.html" rel="nofollow">http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/income-inequalit...</a> (big ups to Shiller)<p>There's a couple of ways to go about resolving this, from heavy handed government intervention to restrict capital, to loosening government restrictions on labour movement.<p>There's outside the box thinking too, from how Iceland forgave those holding good homes rather than those holding bad debt to opening the pool of capital to a wider pool of people in the vein of equity crowdfunding---<p>this is a very pressing issue, and there are tons of solutions out there. I think the one constant is that if technology is going to play a role in solving this, people need to be given equal access to that technology, and the knowledge required to understand it. discuss and spread code!
Sometimes I wonder if any new investment that I make in my skillset is just buying me a few more months of profitable employment at some point around say 2050. The loss of employment for less skilled labour is happening now, but I see no reason why eventually all labour could be supplanted by increasingly efficient machinery/robotics (for physical tasks), and AI for information/services tasks.<p>Capital is increasingly producing greater returns than labour, and market pressure is causing businesses to invest in capital as a result... but what does the economy do when labour cannot produce or earn, and hence cannot spend?
The biggest issue here is that it's the middle level jobs that are being automated, which makes it increasingly harder for low skilled workers to work their way up over time. There was a good article in The Atlantic that discussed this a while back [1].<p>I'm not sure what the solution is, but increasing erosion of the middle class doesn't sound like a good thing.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/308844/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-i...</a>
The next logical step is to increase taxes on capital, starting with an increase in the capital gains tax.<p>Of course the Economist doesn't mention this... EDIT: Oops, maybe they did. Good for them.
Doesn't this more or less imply that you have to save and invest in order to take part in economic growth? I agree that this is a problem which should be attacked with political means, but that doesn't mean it is impossible for someone to live within their means and save.<p>Obviously this doesn't apply to every demographic group in the world, but a large amount of people can get an account with a cheap online stockbroker and buy ETFs with the surplus of their paycheck.
If you think things through:<p>1. We were all born with the same rights.<p>2. Therefor, we should all <i>have</i> (and keep) the same rights.<p>3. Yet, we don't have all the same wealth (money=rights) - FAR from it.<p>How come we accept that people who were born more lucky than others get to have more rights? When we were all born equal?<p>How come society still accepts this basic and too obvious hypocrisy?
> The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of mostly rich countries, reckons that labour captured just 62% of all income in the 2000s, down from over 66% in the early 1990s. That sort of decline is not supposed to happen.<p>Has the fraction of people supported by capital as opposed to labor stayed constant over that time period? I know OECD countries have been aging, it wouldn't take that much of a demographic shift towards retirees and other non-laborers to account for the change.
Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen have the most well reasoned visions of the future of the global economy.<p>Hanson predicts <i>virtually all</i> human wages moving to near zero in the long run.<p><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/robot-econ-primer.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/robot-econ-primer.html</a><p><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/07/me-on-pbs-off-book.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/07/me-on-pbs-off-book.htm...</a>
Does anyone have a graph showing (per country labor share) * (per country real gdp) over time?<p>It would appear to me that if <i>that</i> quantity is actually increasing, then this is an interesting curiosity and alarming in that we don't understand it, but not actually an outright disaster, as the pie would still be growing fast enough to feed labor more in real terms.
This is one reason why I find the consumer debt phenomenon disturbing.<p>Until 1975 or so, there was a symbiosis between the capitalists and labor. If labor was impoverished, products weren't bought. Henry Ford learned this: by paying his workers well, he made it so they could afford his products. The middle class was built because, without it, industry would fail.<p>Widespread consumer debt-- which went from being associated with failure (excluding mortgages and a first car, and a very small amount for college that could be paid off fully in 1-2 years) to a commonplace occurrence-- made it possible for the consumption (and, more relevantly, consumption <i>costs</i>) to grow while wages remained flat, putting the working classes further into debt and subordination.<p>That's what's happening now. Even if you're fiscally responsible, you compete (on the housing market, and for higher education) with the masses who are, in general, utterly the opposite. It is somewhat of a brilliant (if malignant) divide-and-conquer strategy.
Seeing this 11 hours later, it devolved into a political fight. Sad.<p>A simple, alternative hypothesis:<p>With the opening of India, China, etc the world has gotten a really, really large increase in work force -- but (not yet) an equal increase in capital for investment. Supply/demand -- the price for the increased resource (workers) goes down.
Perhaps because "capital" is composed of the products sold because labor is willing to pay for them? These two sides aren't as cleanly drawn as people might like to think. The preferences of individuals drive the economies of the world (except in North Korea).
All around the world, ursine mammals defecate in forests.<p>I suppose though that it's a good thing that the Economist is at least talking about it.