Rich People, Robots: Are we Effed?

[MrSaigon]

What do you do if you don't work all day?

Babysit organs until the rich need them, probably.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

• The spread of nonworking men and underemployed youth. The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54 years old) who are working has been trending down since 2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the share of prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s, and has increased as much throughout the recovery as it did during the Great Recession itself. All in all, about one in six prime-age men today are either unemployed or out of the workforce altogether. This is what the economist Tyler Cowen calls “the key statistic” for understanding the spreading rot in the American workforce. Conventional wisdom has long held that under normal economic conditions, men in this age group—at the peak of their abilities and less likely than women to be primary caregivers for children—should almost all be working. Yet fewer and fewer are.

The Economist did a piece on this recently basically concluding that manufacturing jobs aren't coming back and men need to adapt to that.

What can be done? Part of the solution lies in a change in cultural attitudes. Over the past generation, middle-class men have learned that they need to help with child care, and have changed their behaviour. Working-class men need to catch up. Women have learned that they can be surgeons and physicists without losing their femininity. Men need to understand that traditional manual jobs are not coming back, and that they can be nurses or hairdressers without losing their masculinity.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/2 ... weaker-sex

But it also goes a little bit deeper, talking about how schools need to adapt policies to help boys that struggle.

[Tim]

John Maynard Keynes predicted the same thing 100 years ago. We're still working pretty hard.

What does the lead singer of Tool have to do with any of this?

[pioneer98]

This is from the same site that talked about "The Fermi Paradox" in the outer space thread. It's really long but good. After reading it, I think we're royally, royally screwed.

One thing they didn't even talk about at all was how this could impact the economy. They talk about the two extreme possible outcomes, which are extinction or immortality. Those are attention-grabbing and, who knows, might even be the most likely in the long run. If we end up somewhere between those two, the most obvious reason to develop artificial superintelligence (ASI) to me is money. If some company develops ASI, they are going to have 1 simple project for it: make us the most money. Even with many safeguards and regulations who knows where that will lead us. We can't even regulate humans trying to make a ton of money right now.

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing—those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.

[pioneer98]

I have a hard time getting this idea inside my head.

Why computers aren't going to steal everyone's jobs

The gist of their argument is that computers and automation make the job cheaper to do and so demand for that kind of job can increase. They use the example of paralegals searching documents during the discovery phase of a trial. There are now automated searches they use during discovery, but this has just increased the number of documents requested during discovery. And someone still has to sort through the results and read them. So that profession has actually grown a lot in the last 15 years. But the problem is the job requires different skills now than it did 20 years ago. The people who can't adapt are the ones in trouble.

A new Oscar Mayer factory is being built here that will employ 700 people. It is replacing one that employs 1,300 people. Does this mean that prices will go down and people will buy more food made by Oscar Mayer? Or will they just keep prices the same and make more money? Most likely it will be a combination of lower prices and increased profit. I just struggle to see those 600 jobs ever coming back due to increased demand for cheaper hot dogs. Did those 600 jobs just get shifted to some other part of the economy that we can't see? I have no idea.

Also if their argument is true and automation is not a big destroyer of jobs, does this mean that the hollowing out of the middle class is almost entirely due to outsourcing?

[IMADreamer]

I have a hard time getting this idea inside my head.

Why computers aren't going to steal everyone's jobs

The gist of their argument is that computers and automation make the job cheaper to do and so demand for that kind of job can increase. They use the example of paralegals searching documents during the discovery phase of a trial. There are now automated searches they use during discovery, but this has just increased the number of documents requested during discovery. And someone still has to sort through the results and read them. So that profession has actually grown a lot in the last 15 years. But the problem is the job requires different skills now than it did 20 years ago. The people who can't adapt are the ones in trouble.

A new Oscar Mayer factory is being built here that will employ 700 people. It is replacing one that employs 1,300 people. Does this mean that prices will go down and people will buy more food made by Oscar Mayer? Or will they just keep prices the same and make more money? Most likely it will be a combination of lower prices and increased profit. I just struggle to see those 600 jobs ever coming back due to increased demand for cheaper hot dogs. Did those 600 jobs just get shifted to some other part of the economy that we can't see? I have no idea.

Also if their argument is true and automation is not a big destroyer of jobs, does this mean that the hollowing out of the middle class is almost entirely due to outsourcing?

It's probably a little bit of automation and a lot of outsourcing. No doubt a huge number of middle class jobs went over seas. You can still see the ghostly shells of the factors in many rust belt cities. You can still see it in my town. We had a Browns shoe factory here that closed up when I was a kid. Something like 400 jobs gone to Indonesia. Pretty much was the begging of the end for my town. Wal Mart came in two years later and now downtown looks like a ghost town. It reminds me of the words of the great prophet Bruce Springsteen "The foreman says these jobs are going boys and they aint coming back... to your home town."

[pioneer98]

Interesting.....may need to pick up this book

Nothing Grows Forever. Digital Industrialism and What Comes Next.

In the midst of all this I read Douglas Rushkoff's new book "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus". It's a crystalline lens through which to make sense of our present-day economic predicament, how we got here and the various ways we might still save ourselves. The book explains precisely how the structure of our corporations and money itself are "programmed" to pursue a scorched-earth policy, extracting value from employees, customers, and markets until they dry up and new markets must be conquered or created. "Digital industrialism" as he calls it has only accelerated this process, with massive platforms like Uber "disrupting" entire industries, supplanting skilled humans first with expendable amateurs (licensed cabdrivers for anyone with a car, hoteliers for AirBnB hosts) and ultimately, wherever possible, shoving humans aside altogether.

In the pre-industrial Middle Ages, as Rushkoff tells it, skilled medieval traders took their wares to market, established personal relationships with their customers, and developed systems of exchange and early forms of money to keep goods flowing. The medieval marketplace definitely wasn't perfect, but it was built upon what tech folks call "peer to peer networks" in which skills and labor were valued and directly tied to their products, and community and business were organically intertwined.

But as the merchant class grew in power and wealth, the increasingly cash-poor nobility wanted a piece of the action. They established charter companies––business monopolies that enabled them to control the flow of capital and extract value from other people's labor. Laborers were paid for their time, not their products, and expensive, skilled artisans were passed over for non-guild workers. Quality often went down, as did merchants' wages, but productivity and profits skyrocketed. As paper money supplanted barter, royalty cornered the market on currency, often lending it out at interest. Money making money for the people who made the money in the first place.

A lot of people buy into this idea that somehow "free markets" are something like a law of nature but in reality our form of commerce is completely manmade, which means we can change it however we want, or even replace it.

The solutions Rushkoff offers (with plenty of real-world examples) often include decentralized currencies like Bitcoin or hybrid systems in which larger currency systems operate alongside local currencies designed to circulate rapidly and stay within their communities. Rushkoff also cites alternative corporate structures that prioritize sustainability over growth, people over profits. Finally (and this will really get the traditional capitalists' blood boiling) he questions the idea that everybody needs an official job and offers compelling evidence that Guaranteed Minimum Income can have major benefits for society.

[Schlich]

I'm all about Basic Income. Milton Friedman is a big proponent of it as well, so I'm thinking it might be one of those things that might have a chance of bipartisan support down the road.

[IMADreamer]

I'm all about Basic Income. Milton Friedman is a big proponent of it as well, so I'm thinking it might be one of those things that might have a chance of bipartisan support down the road.

I just can't envision a day when you see the right even thinking about voting for this. These are the same people that want to do away with welfare and Medicaid. The think people who want a higher minimum wage are lazy. No chance in the next 50 years that we get basic income.

[Schlich]

I'm all about Basic Income. Milton Friedman is a big proponent of it as well, so I'm thinking it might be one of those things that might have a chance of bipartisan support down the road.

I just can't envision a day when you see the right even thinking about voting for this. These are the same people that want to do away with welfare and Medicaid. The think people who want a higher minimum wage are lazy. No chance in the next 50 years that we get basic income.

Paul Ryan's comments, the collapse of the republican party and its eventual replacement with something that resembles actual and logical fiscal conservatism, and the sheer desperation that will be brought on by the continuing growth of income inequality, all give me cautious optimism that this will happen sooner rather than later. 50 years might be a good estimate but I'd hope for something closer to 20 or 30. Either way, I'll still be young, alive, and kickin

I'm not stuck in today's political realities. Political landscapes shift a lot. We're still seeing the fallout of "welfare reform" that really started/kicked up in the 90's with gingrich, from what I understand. I think it's about at its end.