I remember being a kid, and thinking that CNN must have some really intelligent, mature writing, that I was simply too young to understand. Now, they post these sensationalist headlines (I was expecting it to be a play on words, e.g. it was an article about funeral planning or life insurance), and fan the flames of idiocy with writing like this:<p>"And if you think your own job is safe, think again. New research predicts that nearly half of all jobs are susceptible to automation over the next two decades."<p>So silicon valley is bad _because_ they find more efficient ways to do things? Should we also be upset with anyone who sells a refrigerator, for making all those poor iceblock-expeditions and milkmen obsolete? Does the "\"sharing economy\"" (my quotes around their quotes, for how much they quote that term) mean that by using our cars, homes, tools, etc. more efficiently, and buying less new stuff, we're actually saying "drop dead" to the people who would have manufactured new things?<p>If there's a large number of people who hold degrees, who don't need the degree for the job they have, isn't that a fault with our education system? What about that bizarre arrogance that so many had in the 80s, where they thought their kids must have a degree so they don't end up in a "blue collar" job? So many would be earning good money now if they'd just gone to a trade school, and learned welding, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, etc. instead of training for one of the office jobs which software has now made largely obsolete.
I am so sick of articles like this which make some broad moral judgement about the new tech economy. This one is even worse than most because the author doesn't even attempt to give some statistical merit to his argument. Instead he takes the lazy route of quoting some quasi-anecdotal BS about how all the young millennials are making their way to SV to develop the next big app as if they're the Oakies of the dustbowl heading west to pick oranges.<p>The fact is, tech has fundamentally restructured the labor market. Some classes of people will do well, and some will lose out. It is not good or evil. What will really determine whether we win out as a society will be how we invest in things like education and infrastructure. Arguments that attempt to write off tech full cloth as evil are useless, as are the pollyanas who think tech will solve everything.
People often forget that paying someone to do something is an expense, not a benefit.<p>Sure, people need jobs, but not jobs that can be done by cheaper and more effectively by machines. Employment opportunities are not a means of themselves.<p>This (IMO flawed) economic thinking is best captured by economist Keynes:<p>"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." [0]<p>[0] Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6 pg.129 "The General Theory.."
The article starts with a magnificent exercise in false equivalence: "We have no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that leave American families financially devastated, yet we give Silicon Valley billionaires a pass when they do the same thing".<p>No, they don't do <i>the same thing</i>. If I automate in 5 minutes with software a process that used to take three people with pencils and erasers four months, I have not done the same thing as taking out insurance policies against bad mortgage securities that only I know are bad because I'm the one who took the good mortgages out and replaced them with bad mortgages because the fine print allowed me to do this.<p>Yes, both do eliminate some jobs. One because those jobs can now be done more efficiently by machines. The other, because massive amounts of wealth was destroyed by financial trickery.<p>It's so hard to get past that point that I almost didn't read the more sensationalistic presented but nonetheless worthy of consideration issues that followed.<p>Yes, social media and other internet behemoths are doing alarming things to privacy. Yes, we need to be concerned if we send millions out of work, with no clear path to employment. Yes, we should be concerned about the intense concentration of wealth in a winner-take-all economy.<p>All kinds of interesting ideas have been presented (minimum basic income, for instance). But you won't find any discussion of them in this article.
Wheeler is chronically uncharitable to technology, and generally comes across a techno-phobic. He's a journalist (and journalism professor) so it's not surprising that he tends to have issues with technology in general.<p>Does he raise valid points? Sure. Some tech companies are just as guilty as Walmart is of exploitative labor practices, but one can't help but take his commentary with a grain of salt, as he slams "crappy automated phone systems" he ignores all of the benefits of new technologies.
Well, that was a weirdly written article... I do think we need the US government to do more for Labor/People in this country. At this point Labor/People are so unrepresented in the political process they are just getting screwed left and right. Unions are a nightmare and keep a lot of bad people in jobs that shouldn't be there, but without them nobody is pushing for fair pay.<p>Why can't the US government pass a plan to push us slowly to a real living wage instead of a minimum wage?<p>Why can't we push for a $12 to $15 an hour living wage across the board and tie it to future inflation?<p>Not enough to be crazy, but enough that people are not stuck in a perpetual trap of poverty.
They need to retitle that article "Old man yells at cloud".<p>The intellectual vacuum of this article can be summed up by the fact that the author chose a <i>fictional character</i> as his Silicon Valley CEO strawman. At least point to a real villain!
"We have no problem taking Wall Street executives to task for decisions that leave American families financially devastated"<p>Right off the bat- do we? Or do we just give them slaps on the wrist and then big bonuses once the news cycle's over?
This article is written from the perspective that everyone is guaranteed a place at the table of the hyper-efficient capitalist economy when no such guarantee has ever been made.<p>If these kids went to college, then surely they learned how to learn, so why not adapt to the market by learning new skills that the market values more? Better than sitting on your ass waiting for the market to adapt to you.<p>Or join the military, file for disability, or get a second crappy job since your free time is likely spent watching netflix and playing games.<p>As alluded to in the article, even the low skill, low paying jobs will be going away soon so the time to act is now.
I'm betting that people like Wheeler where the same ones who were crying out that the industrial revolution would bring only suffering and mass unemployment to most of society.
Relevant:<p>Luddite (noun) : one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest;<p>From Wikipedia : The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-replacing machinery from 1811 to 1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.
When I read the URL, I was initially worried because I thought Tom Wheeler was saying this.<p>>As anyone who's talked to an automated system on the phone lately can attest, "automated" usually means "worse."<p>He does have a point there. It takes me much longer to buy my groceries using self-checkout than it does to go stand in line for a human to ring up my purchases. Using an automated phone system is similarly pretty irritating.
"Only 36% of college grads have jobs that pay at least $45,000... after adjusting for inflation"<p>! 45k? And here I thought my 30K job in mid 90's after college was a windfall.
Semi-correct but terribly argued.<p>First, Silicon Valley sucks but it's not the fault of "technology". The Valley has been successfully conquered by the mainstream business elite. They've won, we've lost. It's not our territory anymore.<p>The corporate elite has been wiping out jobs for generations and, to be fair, that's not always a bad thing to be doing. The crime isn't that jobs end. It's that these corporations won't pay to train people up into the new jobs that are created, dodge their taxes and therefore emasculate the government, and lobby for an economic status quo that is harmful to most people.<p>Second, "technology" (as a force) generates wealth but doesn't distribute it well. There are a number of reasons for that, but one is that engineers don't care enough to change the distribution of newly-created wealth from what it is. If the engineers who build technology are at fault, it's through inaction rather than malice. We'd rather be curing cancer than helping businessmen unemploy people, but when you look at the current socio-political structure of society, it's only set up to go one way on that.
Speaking as a "millenial": that was painfully stupid and irritating to read.<p>Look: I don't want "jobs", not as an abstract commodity produced because someone decided <i>everyone has to have a job</i>, and that's that. I want <i>a</i> job that matches my skillset (it's reasonably good), compensates me well, and lets me actually contribute to human progress. If human progress has advanced so far that even someone with my skills is mostly unnecessary, I want a means of supplying for myself that minimizes the personal burden of labor on other people (note: not robots, not corporations, <i>people</i>), and enables me to get on with my life and have fun -- there's more to the world than careerism.<p>Yes, the sharing economy has been built on the extreme precarity of its workers. Yes, technology destroys "jobs". But overall, the problem here is not technology: it's capitalism.