[DanielBMarkham]

"...It’s always hard to say whether economic changes are cyclical or structural, but I think it’s fair to say that there’s a slowly accumulating consensus that technology is now destroying jobs faster than it’s creating them..."

That's a strange thing to say, because I'm of the opinion that more people worldwide are employed in productive economic activity than at any time in the past. In fact, that we've lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in the last decade or so.

I was going to start this off with "here we go again" because observing this great change that's overtaking us and catastrophizing about it seems to be a cottage industry -- and has been for many decades. No doubt general purpose computers and robots are going to massively change the face of society and commerce. I'll even go so far and guess that parts of our coming evolution are going to be painful -- just like it always has been.

But our relationship to the worldwide economy is a funny thing. We can sit back, assume that we're appropriately educated, tooled, and have the right attitude for success, then complain when there aren't jobs. Or we can choose to monitor and adapt to where the economy actually is. When we read about great changes coming, we should be thinking about the great opportunities we're going to have and how to adapt to meet the future, not about "what to do when your job is gone" That's self-fulfilling horse hockey.

There's an infinite amount of economic activity left in the world. The question is whether we want to learn how to engage in it or sit on the sidelines worrying about terrible structural changes that will doom us all.

[lkrubner]

But you can acknowledge that there may be a real scarcity of work for people who have low IQ? In the past, there was always manual labor, which could soak up all labor so long as aggregate demand in the economy was great enough -- and the best way to ensure sufficient aggregate demand, in the past, was typically a combination of productivity gains and sufficient monetary creation. But what happens when all the work that can be done by low IQ people is automated?

You might be willing to respond with "New forms of work will open up that will allow for the employ of those people with low IQs". However, I am asking you to consider the hypothetical where every such form of work is eventually automated by machines that have sufficiently advanced AI.

Between 1850 and 1973 there were immense improvements in labor productivity that completely transformed the world, and for a long time the rising productivity created more new jobs, rather than less. But going forward, we face a situation where increasing automation will still create new wealth, and it will still create huge improvements in labor productivity, but the improvements will only be available for those who have enough IQ to understand the technologies in use.

And much of this scenario might come to pass during the next 50 years. But imagine even further afield -- imagine 200 years now. Do you think the period 1850 to 1973 offers a reasonable model to think about, say for instance, economic growth between 2100 and 2200?

What happens if there comes a day when absolutely everything is automated and humans no longer need to work? We have reached utopia, yes? But you can probably see where I am going with this: eventually there needs to be some way to provide an income to people, when the day eventually comes when no one needs to work.

[thwarted]

What happens if there comes a day when absolutely everything is automated and humans no longer need to work? We have reached utopia, yes? But you can probably see where I am going with this: eventually there needs to be some way to provide an income to people, when the day eventually comes when no one needs to work.

I never understand the logic of this argument. If everything is automated and everyone is provided for (this is a utopia, after all), why would people need an income? By definition, if people do not need to work, then they do not need an income. The need to work and the need for an income are the same thing, just worded differently.

[TeMPOraL]

The problem isn't with the state of this utopia; the true difficulties lie in transition process - when more and more things get automated, but the overall economy still forces you to have an income or starve. The real challenge of our times is how we get from here to there without a huge mess and a lot of suffering in the middle.

[thwarted]

Yes, the transition will be an upset, like all transitions are. But what I quoted doesn't talk about the transition to the utopia, it talks about the utopia having been reached and people still needing an income. If people's needs are not being provided for they will need income, presumably by trading their time/effort for a means of exchange (money), but if that is the case, then the utopia has not been achieved.

Nothing happens overnight, and confusing the challenges of the transition with the endgame, or that the challenges that existed during the transition will still exist after the endgame is achieved, presents a position that the endgame isn't worth it because the transition disturbs the status quo.

[rollo_tommasi]

Yeah, but the question is, where are these economic gains from automation and AI going? They don't just go into the ether - they'll accumulate to whoever financed the automated whatsit, and rightly or wrongly that person will not willingly share their vastly increased income with a superfluous zero-leverage former workforce. This is exactly what is happening now as massive productivity gains over thirty years have failed to translate into an increase in real wealth distributed across the population. The technological solution creates a social problem.

[waps]

From the "What If Technology Is Destroying Jobs Faster Than It Creates Them?" one of the links of the article:

> It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys more jobs than it creates. As my friend Simon Law says, “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”

And this is of course true, the only thing that makes software cheaper is the one resource it can actually save on : people. I would even argue that, generally, when software replaces a person, it is actually less efficient in all but one metric : it generally uses more resources than a person would use for the same work.

So I'm arguing that mostly the efficiency gains from technology are negative, but you're trading expensive resources (people) for cheap ones (power, computers, robots ...).

A few more arguments for this : 1) machines are more precise, but require better inputs, which require more resources, and what they can't deal with is generally not recycled, as that would destroy the value of those machines. 2) the human body is surprisingly efficient (especially knowing how general it is in function. Usually the more generally useful something, the less efficient. Humans are among the most efficient animals and are vastly more general). Our body beats oil based energy, and beats coal based energy by a large margin (input in watts versus output in work). 3) saving the expense of keeping the human alive is useless ... unless, of course you intend to kill/starve/ignore till they're dead/... said human. You're just creating a negative externality. 4) as the past centuries have pointed out, saving human labor is completely useless if they're your market. The last French king had a much less comfortable life than a homeless man has today, with few exceptions : servants and available space. But seriously, even the food that was served to that king, I wouldn't touch it (I shudder to think what medieval kings ate). His toilet is only slightly better than a hole in the ground. Sheets, beds, ... all are cleaner, more functional and a LOT softer today. And about cleaning ... well people actually clean themselves today. I shudder to think of the smell of Versailles in the 19th century.

The argument "but life never gets worse in history" has plenty of counterexamples, the biggest one (imho) the end of the Roman Empire, which took half a millennium to recover from. But there were plenty, say, the muslim conquests of Northern Africa would be another example. Started out with >50% of the population pretty comfortable (e.g. running water, heating, public fountains, roads, working medical infrastructure, surgical procedures available to middle class and even a significant part of the slave class), working travel infrastructure, life expectancy at ~57 years and ended with tribes who effectively lived in the stone age (average life expectancy at one point under 20), and a few lords who lived at a comfort level that was at best what it was at the beginning of the iron age. They would remain locked in this situation for more than a millennium. Some pockets of technology remained, like Cairo, which retained it's Christian institutions up to this day. But technology can't compete with free labor, so it couldn't expand despite many, many tries.

[cousin_it]

The problem is about distribution, not production. Not everyone will own these magical means of automation, and owners will have no incentive to share with non-owners, because non-owners cannot offer anything that owners need.

[Retric]

The lack of low skilled jobs in the US is primarily a combination of zero import taxes with China etc and a minimum wage. We still want all those tshits and painted plastic toys that used to be low skilled laber in the US we just don't use people in the US to make them.

[TomJoad]

What does a "low IQ" have to do with manual labor? IQ or any other measure of so called intelligence, has never -- and will probably never -- have any correlation with a person's occupation. Ultimately, it is the parent's socio-economic status which usually dictates what jobs their children will have.

The fact that you believe it could be a person's "IQ" which dictates what job they may have really shows how little regard you have for people.

[Strilanc]

> Ultimately, it is the parent's socio-economic status which usually dictates what jobs their children will have.

That's not an agreed upon fact.

For example, a cursory googling of "correlation between iq and job" brings up a lot of articles with language like "This is why hundreds of studies have found that IQ predicts job performance best (though not all that well) at the start of a person’s career, and progressively weakens over the course of that career."[1] or subtitles like "Intelligence wins out over socio-economic status when it comes to career advancement"[2]. (But maybe that search term is biased. I just entered the most obvious thing.)

As another example, wikipedia says "The validity of IQ as a predictor of job performance is above zero for all work studied to date, but varies with the type of job and across different studies, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6. The correlations were higher when the unreliability of measurement methods was controlled for."[3]

> really shows how little regard you have for people.

Inappropriate.

1. http://danielgoleman.info/the-trouble-with-iq/

2. http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=1637...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_perf...

[JamesArgo]

Look, that sounds nice and all, but it just isn't true. Some people are smarter than others. This should be an incredibly uncontroversial claim. Also, textbook ad hominem at the end there.

The fact that you believe a persons "height" dictates their chance of competing in the NBA really shows how little regard you have for people.

[cle]

"When we read about great changes coming, we should be thinking about the great opportunities we're going to have and how to adapt to meet the future, not about "what to do when your job is gone" That's self-fulfilling horse hockey."

I think this overlooks a very real problem. There are a large number of real people out there who lose their jobs because of this. Essentially their skills are no longer valuable, so they need to learn new skills. How are they going to afford the insane cost of going back to school? It's a tough situation, and even tougher if they have a family. And if both spouses worked in the same labor market, they could easily fall into poverty trying to feed their children.

Of course structural changes won't "doom us all". It does doom many people who suddenly find themselves in expired labor markets with no way out. We need technological advances, but we also need to find ways to adapt to those changes better in order to minimize the collateral damage.

[xinsight]

A TED talk with Andrew McAfee made an interesting observation: once long-haul trucks are fully automated (the tech exists, it's just a matter of time), there will be a massive number of truckers suddenly out of work. Yes, other types jobs will no doubt be created, but i'm not sure many of those truck drivers will be in a good position to make the transition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMF-Z74C1QE