Get Ready To Lose Your Job

A big, unmentioned one: virtually all middlemen who do not add significant value are obsolete.<p>This includes salesmen, sales representatives, dealers, warehousers (replaced by on-demand everything), many types of brokers, etc.<p>This is a huge chunk of the economy. In the old industrial economy there were layers and layers of bureaucracy and markups between the producer and the customer. Now there will be at most one. The customer and the producer will deal directly. Everyone else is cut out.<p>That one layer -- an Amazon type thing -- will be heavily monopolized by a few big players (Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc.) and will be <i>very</i> low margin / high-volume.

I've always seen this as a social problem - why, when we automate things, does the demand that people have jobs persist? Surely if there's less work to do then everyone should be working less, not finding new things to do. There's an implicit assumption in our society that everyone must work, even when there is nothing to be done. Productivity is put on a pedestal when it is just a means to an end - undesirable means, at that.<p>I strongly believe that putting people out of work and allowing them to continue living comfortably will bring hidden benefits. There will be more time to think, reconcile and determine the best path to take as opposed to mindlessly doing as much as possible just to earn enough for bread and shelter.<p>Bertrand Russell wrote a good essay on this - In Praise Of Idleness: <a href="http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html</a><p>As a software developer, someone who will stay employed in the coming years, I'm willing to give up some of my salary so that the newly unemployed can continue to survive and do what they want with their free time. They pay people in our profession more than enough to live well. Unfortunately, I haven't found a decent mechanism to make such a contribution, aside from helping family and friends. There really ought to be one - a voluntary communism, so to say.

Like the author, I too am concerned people aren't taking this seriously. Not to say that anything can be done about it, but just to face it (as you would your own mortality): If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you <i>are</i> developing software, and not keeping up with advances, yours will too.<p>This is not fiction, this is truth and it's inevitable. I'm curious how society will adapt to the fact that the finite resources of the world will actually start to constrain them. Almost certainly birth rates will decline. Households will probably return to a single income earner (who is now making what both earners used to make combined).<p>The world <i>will</i> be different, but people keep trying to hold onto this notion of 6% unemployment like it's sacred. It's a relic of days where we needed the human brain and body because it worked faster than a computer and robot. Such is no longer the case. <i>That</i> is the paradigm shift, and <i>that's</i> why things will be different.

I was having a discussion about this topic with an economist friend of mine. His theory was that if one took automization to its complete and logical conclusion, the only people left employed would be "soft" creators like artists and clergy, plus creators of hand-made goods which in that world would fetch an enormous premium. We'd also see a boom for experience-seekers, like tourism and sports.<p>Ultimately I think we're inexorably heading towards that kind of reality. The question is how long will it take, and will it be a peaceful conversion or a violent one. Personally I think innate human greed, pettiness, jealousy, and tribalism is going to make that shift unpleasant for the generation stuck with it. I hope I'm proved wrong.

Get ready to have the same old arguments about Marxism. Only instead of 'means of production' it will be 'means of technology'. The article isn't looking for truth its looking to push an agenda about class with technology as a proxy.<p>Technology invariably leads to an overall increase in jobs and wealth. The computer calculating amortization tables may put a banker out of work, but it also allows thousands of unskilled workers to perform a task that would require calculating one. A job they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

I'm committing the sin of commenting on the headline, not the article (I did read the article)<p>Too few people in steady jobs follow this advice. They live at or above their means, and aren't prepared for even 1-3 months of unemployment.<p>Many opportunities require things to get a bit worse before they get a lot better. Keeping a buffer gives you the freedom to take those opportunities.<p>If you've got a job in tech, you probably have the luxury of earning more than you need. So if you aren't doing it, an excellent policy is to scale back expenses until you have at least 2-6 month's wages in short term savings.<p>Having a side project that gives some recurring revenue isn't a bad idea either.

Here's a more banal prediction: construction will add about two million new jobs between now and 2020, health services will add five million, other services about 13 million, mining another 25,000. There will be declines in manufacturing and agriculture, but only in the tens of thousands, because honestly, we've already gutted those industries. (Meanwhile, there will be proportionate gains in those industries in other cheap labor countries, indicating this isn't a tech thing.) If anything, post some magic moment where general purpose robotification (google "PR2") is super cheap, manufacturing will flood to... dunno... whatever country is best at keeping the lights on. Maybe Japan? (Excluding weather events, they have about 1/1000th of the grid disturbances we have in the US, it's freakish - but then maybe it's unfair to exclude weather).<p>Basically, trends will continue exactly as they have, and as exactly as almost every trade theorist predicted at the outset of globalization. We're getting out of manufacturing. We're doubling down on services. It has very little to do with technology.<p>PS: If you have a high school diploma or less, you are fucked. Your best move was to start advocating for trade assistance or aggressively progressive taxation ten years ago.

This guy sounds like a sociopath, and his characterization that massive unemployment is ultimately "a good thing" is mystifying.<p>Even in a hypothetical post-scarcity world, there are things to do, and objectives to pursue. The question is just whether your survival and well-being are dependent on your pursuits. Transitioning the world to a place where one's job is not a major part of one's identity would be a massive, and probably misguided effort.<p>Also, it's also pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand the graph he has posted here: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/america-has-hit-peak-jobs/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/america-has-hit-peak-jobs/</a><p>That's a static snapshot. It's not like there is a fixed group that is always in the top 2%. In fact, one would hope in a meritocracy, there is a healthy flow in and out of the 2% that <i>keeps</i> people striving and attempting new things. A world where there's a permanent fixed elite is a world of stagnation.

Been meaning to start reading Race Against The Machine: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005...</a><p>As a guy who studied Economics in college and now programs, it's something I think a lot about.

This may sound very Euro-chauvinist, but I wonder if politically and culturally Europe isn't much better equipped to deal with this. After all, social security solutions like a base income for everyone, employed or not, are things that can (and have been) seriously considered in most European countries.<p>I'm not saying that guarantees anything, but it seems to me that the social and political culture of the US prevents it from even considering alternatives until it is very, very late.

TBH, I really hope we stop calling the current era the information age and instead start calling it the automation age. It's more accurate. Information is now no longer being used by humans but by computers. In many cases now, we simply generate too much informations for humans to comprehend, parse or analyze without computers doing more and more of the heavy lifting. The information is instead being parsed, analyzed and comprehended by computers who then act upon the understanding that has been programmed into them.

The point about the cars reminds me of Rush - Red Barchetta:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U</a> <a href="http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108819/" rel="nofollow">http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108819/</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta</a><p>About a person who finds an old red sportscar in his Uncle's countryside house, after the passage of a "motor law".

Two points.<p>1. GDP growth is a historical anomaly. Many post industrial peoples base today'financing decisions on tomorrow's expected income gains. In a world of low to no growth, you must save early and significantly for retirement, and retirement will still require working.<p>2. Technological advances will shift the jobs to those that can add value. That is precisely marketing and sales.

It's rather "simple" after you get over the social issues. Socialism/Communism: in this case there is a LOT of mone.. eu resources to give away ! Or work very little :)<p>The biggest problem are going to be the 1% who will be screaming ... and reaping the benefits before revolution?<p>&#60;cruel mode&#62;Then again we would only need to kill 1% of the population.&#60;/cruel&#62;

&#62;Not everyone can become a computer programmer, genetic counselor, or startup CEO; a whole lot of Mead’s “ordinary people” will be stripped of their jobs and left behind in debt, poverty, and despair.<p>So basically if you're reading HN, the title probably doesn't apply to you.

Get ready to lose your job- unless you have the skills to automate peoples' jobs.

CurtWelch's comments in that article are fantastic.

Techcrunch plus a trolling title means I'm not reading it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven thousand times and maybe I'll start to learn a lesson.

Haven't people basically been saying this since computers were invented? Hey lets try it again, probably right the 300th time!

Two possibilities: continuation of existing trends, leading to a hyper focus on education, or a sudden reversal, where we live in a post-technological world.<p>Some are speculating about needing to work less or not at all. I would argue that we WILL work less, only because we will have to spend more time in education. It seems like however much society &#38; science advances, we still need people to sort things out and run the whole huge machine of society. For example, machines can't parse Mochizuki's conjectured proof of the ABC conjecture. That requires clever humans to wade through hundreds of pages of analysis, carefully inspecting for holes. It takes more clever humans to program clever machines.<p>The little work that we do becomes incredibly powerful, but most of our time is spent learning. We will learn as teams instead of as individuals, where each person takes a tiny wedge of the pie and learns to master it and learns to master the tools necessary to deal with the wedge. This already happens with scientific papers. New scientific papers are published by teams of old people, but almost never by young people. This pattern is going to spread from the hard sciences into every line of work, until everything operates like science. Construction, engineering, marketing design -- everything will be huge dollops of education to a small speck of actual application, but that speck will be incredibly powerful.<p>Now, if we eventually unlock a new frontier, like exploring other planets or underwater / underground cities, then we'll probably have a place for people who simply thirst for adventure. (So far information technology has been basically a place for adventure-seekers -- an immature discipline where you can get by without following the dictates of some elite, because even the elites do not fully understand this discipline yet.) The conditions those societies will experience will be extremely new and different, and may require new tools and new ways of making things happen. But for the most part, I see the (comfortable) person of the future on the one hand being a great generalist, able to switch directions when a position becomes unnecessary, and on the other hand a great specialist, learning everything there is to know about less and less, and that's what he actually lives off of.<p>What if there's a reversal? The whole thing may come crashing down, and we might have to start over. We would live in a bizarre world where life is about recycling all the astonishing things synthesized in a previous culture, instead of being about making new things at a blistering pace. We make more and more things that are better and better, and we're just throwing away astonishing amounts of stuff. Rummaging through garbage cans and land fills might be the work of the future, if the higher class (1%) were to collapse permanently. If there's no one to spearhead the increasingly difficult march to technology, it may become cheaper to reuse previous things instead of inventing new ones.