The first job I automated out of existence was by incorporating a "print all" button into an existing application. We had to hire someone, full time, to open each document and print it.
I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like in thirty years. All we know is the genie is out of the bottle and nobody is going to put it back in.
Maybe we're headed for a dystopic corporatist future where everything is monitored, calculated and automated to such a degree that people are simply told what to buy at regular intervals. Mass acceptance will lead to computers dictating through goal posting, achievements and leaderboards the vast majority of each individual's lives.
Maybe we'll simply have 80% unemployment; towering concrete skyscrapers that would rival the soviet era Paneláks with automated trains sending food in and taking waste out. Like a human powered coal plant. The vast numbers of unemployed will churn daily riots and huge sections of the country will be under military control. There will be an unspoken but utterly clear separation between the decision makers and those in the bread lines.
Maybe we'll come up with entirely new sectors in biology, space and automation which will usher in the real space-age of humanity.
My hope: We'll make some breakthroughs in science, mathematics, medicine and technology. New sectors will be created that nobody ever thought of, a few new billionaires will be added to the pile, our quality of life will improve and the threat of our complete and utter demise will have been greatly exaggerated.
In the idle moments of any day my brainpower eventually leads to these sort of questions that we will have to ask ourselves about the future of societies. (this CS + Philosophy degree I "purchased" has been a very expensive anti-sleep aid...)
The anthropological world has gone through several ages as far as I can see it, from an Agricultural to Industrial to Mechanized (post WWII) to Digital (post 1990). I made up the names, but I'm sure the paradigms are obvious.
I want to make it clear that this "crisis of abundance" is not exactly a new question. Even moving to agrarian living had growing pains. The best example philosophically detailing this, I think, is the work by Thomas Paine called Agrarian Justice. (that's the same Paine as Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Age of Reason)
Agrarian Justice is a short pamphlet that I think everyone should read. It details in simple terms how civilized society is different from those who live off the land (such as some Native Americans of the time). Civilization clearly makes some people much better off, but others in civilization seem to be much worse off, condemned to lives of destitution, pollution, etc.
Land ownership and development is a clear plus, but in agrarian societies people "lose" their natural inheritance of the land because of this ownership, and land taxes should be levied to make up for the loss of a natural inheritance.
In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society.
Nothing was done in 1795, and little to the same effect is being done today, though ownership has become a lot more pronounced (we are no longer largely farmers after all). Unfortunately, I think society today would think the idea far more radical than those of Paine's generation, not least of which we owe to certain political elements.
A copy of the pamphlet is hosted on - where else - the official US Social Security website. I really do recommend you give it a read, it isn't long!
> In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society.
Another Marxist philosopher, eh?
Forced contribution backed up by violence of the state doesn't sound like justice to me, and is fundamentally incompatible with the liberty envisioned by America's founding fathers. If only we'd listen to them, we'd all be better off.
Edit: my delivery is either a bit too deadpan, or HN readers have encountered enough would-be libertarians who are completely unaware that Paine is arguably a founding father and Marx wasn't borne until 1818 that my attempt at satire has already been beaten by reality. I'll hope it's the former.
Bertrand Russell is another person who's written on that subject. His question was more or less: if we reach the point where our basic needs can be taken care of by robots, will that mean everyone starts with their basic needs taken care of... or will it instead mean that whoever owns the robots, and claims their labor, will be in a very strong position?
What you have written looks really interesting... but I am curious as to why you think this is not already in effect? Just thinking about Ireland, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia... the minimum income concept is firmly ingrained in unemployment benefits and means-tested social welfare. It needs a lot more to really restore equality, because equality of opportunity requires investment in education and rules against monopoly and nepotism/cronyism, but they are there too!
I want to zoom in from the big picture and look at something more local. Let's say you're like me and you're a well-paid knowledge worker in, say, San Francisco, and lets further suppose that your industry is creating an incredible stratification of wealth in a very small, volatile space.
And let's say you're like the OP, and you're feeling a little bit guilty that you're putting people out of work, and making it harder for people to meet their own basic needs in other ways.
Instead of arguing that we should all pay more taxes, tax yourself. Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.
It's called Noblesse Oblige. It used to be a thing. It ought to be again.
why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth? It gets worse when you take the marginal utility of money into account. Capitalism has this wonderful feature where industry goes and sets up shop wherever people have it worst off because their labor is the cheapest. This infrastructure improves the crappy areas until it is no longer the worst, repeat. The world has thus been ratcheting itself out of extreme poverty since the industrial revolution.
But you miss the important point. It's easy to do what you think is right (at least when it comes to spending money that you have), but what's the use of it if others keep behaving in the ways you consider wrong? The whole point of it is to control other people so that they would behave right too! And if you don't have to persuade them but actually can force them to comply using the threat of violence - even better! What enlightened and liberal person wouldn't want everybody to act as he likes under the threat of violence?
I'm working on a longer answer to satisfy the people who think there's a zero-sum game between whether my neighbors get evicted or whether there are enough mosquito nets for African children, but I want to take a stab at it:
I care more about the immediate social fabric I live in than the relative poverty of people in other places. It's because I think that other social problems are merely symptoms of a mindset that allows people to think of themselves as seperate from the social fabric where they live.
I believe the way we solve the problem laid out in the OP is by creating resilient local communities that can take care of their own needs with minimal resource input, and I believe that geographic arbitrage and global division of labor have created many of the problems that responses to this post have suggested my money is better spent alleviating.
I further believe that when we solve social problems in our own commuities, we create templates for action that can be used by others, and that this is more efficient than using charity to impose solutions for social problems from without.
Lastly, I think anybody who thinks of themselves as an island, disconnected from the people and place immediately surrounding them, is delusional.
Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the
local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of
using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on
roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.
These are all ways that you can spend money to help people, and as someone who is rich (globally speaking) this is a good approach. But if you care about how far your giving goes [1] then you can do better via carefully evaluated charities like GiveDirectly [2] or the AMF [3].
Why would you shop local? That just biases in favour of people who already live in high wage San Francisco vs, say, poor labourers in China or Vietnam.
Similar to the roommate. That's just helping one random guy.
That's all fine. But there are better uses for your money to help humanity. Give to Doctors without Borders, or so.
Idea on the roommate thing that I've always found works well: add everyone's income in the house together, determine Each's percentage of the household income, and divvy up bills accordingly.
This is a facile take on the economics of technology. Productivity increased steadily throughout the 20th century and while in the short term that may have eliminated certain (mostly unskilled) functions, it didn't lead to widespread unemployment. Improvements in technology move the world forward, there's no reason to feel guilty about it.
"...We (programmers) all are, on some level or another; we’re taking mundane repetitive tasks and automating them with code..."
Yes, and no. I have been programming or improving things all my life. That means, if you don't look too deeply, yes, I am a jobs destroyer.
But if you're not going to look too deeply, just don't bother looking at all.
We programmers take inefficient things and make them efficient. Old, bloated code gets streamlined. What used to take a person an hour takes five minutes.
You'd think -- if you kind of squinted your eyes the right way -- that eventually we'd just make the entire universe efficient and there would be no more jobs. You'd think something and it would come into existence. Many people are able to think this far ahead, and it scares them. Along, presumably, with many other things.
The problem is that such simple-minded projections of the future never pan out that way. Over and over again we make something more efficient, take away entire categories of jobs, and still people have more to do than ever. Why? There's a book in that response, but let's just say in deference to Jurassic Park, "jobs find a way". An economy is a complex system where people are always wanting something -- even when they're fed, clothed, housed, and taken care of -- and other people are always providing it. They trade, and it's this species-programmed pattern of trading that led us out of the Savannah and onto the moon.
This is the nth article along the same lines -- the future is devoid of jobs. I'm very sorry that our educational system in many western countries is ill-preparing many for work, and they face long periods of unemployment made worse by debt. It's a travesty and a scandal and we need to fix it. But don't extrapolate current unfortunate structural unemployment with the end of life, the universe, and everything. Don't flatter yourself. You are not a jobs destroyer. You're just some schmuck doing his job like the rest of us.
That's because we haven't yet produced a general-purpose quality AI which can do everything humans can do and more cost effectively than they do it. But when this happens, pretty much everything, even creative work like graphical design - everything will be cloudsourced.
I agree overall, but I don't think the basic mechanism of why we have more work than ever is "jobs finding a way." That characterizes the process as jobs self-replicating, mutating, and adapting.
It's more that improvements in information processing generally (over the long-term) raise all boats, and do not fundamentally alter capitalism's competitive essence. Increasingly complex information processing can be automated, but that just moves the competition to a different playing field (er, boat pond). Until computers can create optimal, marketable solutions to novel problems, competition will always provide jobs for humans. They will just be different jobs.
Laudable for its social concern. A call for basic income, dare-I-say it... a socialist ideal. Will socialism emerge from our globally, militarily exported democratocapitalismywayorthehighway technocracy? Perhaps, but decentralization of political and mass-media control needs to be won back first.
Where does the western world want to go today? The government surveillance dyastopia and endless drone-wars of Assange's Cypherpunks introduction (http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm) or some kind of free education, basic income guaranteed, relative socialist utopia? A false dichotomy, for sure, but extremely worrisome in its validity nonetheless.
In short, it is fantastic and timely (as always) to see programmers thinking about social impact of their actions. More of this!
Then you'll want to read "Four Futures."[1] It isn't by a programmer, but it has sci-fi references and the author talks about 3d printing. It's so brilliant I can never recommend it enough.
There seems to be a good bit of "if you are in the unemployment camp, you aren't contributing to society and are effectively worthless" that I get from some comments in this thread.
I know for a fact if a basic income surfaced I would jump immediately into solving a long-run "big problem" like learning robotics, brain-computer interfaces, etc. Without the burden of having to seek someone to pay me for my time to eat, I'd go tackle what I cared about more than what people with money to feed me cared about. I think that would have pervasive implications on everyone, and with a necessary cultural shift away from consumption towards conceptualization and self actualization, we might be able to get a majority of people taking up creative endeavors to improve the world in ways our current economic engine doesn't come close to promoting.
Why is making a job obsolete destroying a job? I see it as progress. It frees up a human resource to find a more rewarding opportunity. Any worker(s) made redundant certainly don't feel that way at the time of impact because they get the opportunity to evolve by trial. One observation I've made regarding replacing people with technology is the inherent brain drain: all the details get abstracted away into the new technology or system and no one remembers or thinks about them anymore. When something goes wrong, those details matter. That creates a different demand and the cycle continues.
Let's start by pulling this discussion apart into three questions:
1. What effect will technology-based efficiency gains have on total wealth?
2. What effect will technology-based efficiency gains have on the distribution of total wealth?
3. What should we do about #1 and #2, especially #2?
The answer to #1, IMO, remains very favorable. And I think that's obvious so long as you measure wealth by the value and owner-/consumer-perceived quality of what is owned and consumed, rather than by market prices.
As for #2 -- a rising tide is clearly lifting a lot of boats worldwide. In the richer countries, that's more debatable -- but I think it's still true. Dollar incomes may be flat, inflation-adjusted, but electronic entertainment (for example) is a lot better than it used to be.
But it's hard to deny that income disparities are on the rise. And it's reasonable to think about those income disparities in part by counting numbers of "good" jobs (probably down) and (of which there are fewer) "great" jobs (probably up).
Historically, "good" jobs have arisen to more than make up for those lost, perhaps after an uncomfortable transition period. If that's what's going on again, we can muddle through without great answers to #3. But if This Time It's Different -- and it well may be -- then we need to reorganize our economy, our work practices, and everything else, rebalancing work/leisure in the way some people (often socialists) were already (and falsely) arguing was necessary decades ago.
--------------------------------------------
And finally -- at a minimum, we're causing problems that society needs to deal with in terms of general job loss. We're also causing other problems, such as privacy threats. So it's our duty, as very fortunate individuals, to also put some effort into alleviating them, or in some other ways of improving the world.
I, of course, have put some effort into the privacy issue. (http://www.dbms2.com/category/liberty-privacy/page/2/ -- more coming soon). Others may look at general economics (e.g. the OP here), or censorship, or the need for better STEM teaching, or in unquestionably beneficial applications of technology, or whatever. But we all should be thinking of what, personally, we can do to try to help.
I think you've already highlighted an interesting signal that This Time It's Different: in the U.S., productivity has increased while wage gains have flat-lined. Workers aren't sharing in the additional created wealth. Sure, the aggregate amount of wealth to the poor has increased over time. I'd think that's a given. If that hasn't happened something has gone horribly wrong. But its value relative to other wealthier groups has steadily declined. That's a bad spot to be in. The workers' increasing productivity is earning themselves a smaller return over time. Indeed a shrinking return. The nastiest consequence of this in my observation has been political; when a large majority of the population has relatively little wealth to toss around (even taken as a whole) it's easy for their political representatives to become unresponsive.
Now, whether It's Different This Time because of characteristics inherent to a steadily improving economic system, or simply because of self-destructive tendencies that wealth-hoarding tends to exhibit, is a question I'd love an answer to. But I'm sure there will be others to tell me that this time is just like all the others too. Maybe I'll hear a decent explanation that allays my concerns.
I don't think it is Different This Time. But the thing is, last time the world's response to overproduction and depression was social democracy version 1, also known as the Postwar Consensus. That deliberate rebalancing of society's wealth distribution resulted in the huge boost of consumption, demand, innovation and productivity we saw for 30 years after that.
Then came the oil shocks, which led to a completely different politics: neoliberalism, or, an economy once-again organized around maximizing capital gains rather than net earnings.
This is not directly replying to you, but something you said made me think:
> so long as you measure wealth by the value and owner-/consumer-perceived quality of what is owned and consumed
What about things that aren't really owned or consumed? Clean air/water, forests. Do they factor into this function somehow? If not, I have difficulty trusting any suggestions based on that definition of "wealth".
And just in general, I'd much rather optimise for happiness than wealth. But it's much harder to quantify, so I guess that's why people don't.
Whenever the income inequality of the US is discussed, I wonder about the global income distribution. The US is no longer a closed system, so it may not be meaningful to consider the US income distribution on its own. Does anyone here know how income inequality is doing globally?
Fixed lump of labor fallacy detected. Counterfactual statements about politics (many republicans signed "no tax raise" pledge - which of course includes everybody's - including author's - taxes) detected. Calling unbased hypothesis "common sense" because the author couldn't find any proof - detected. Unbased assumption about how drastically raising taxes would generate tons of new income - instead of widespread evasion - detected. New and useful ideas - not detected.
Lump of labor of course grows as economy develops but it doesn't have to always grow faster than automation reduces it.
Given that we automate things faster and faster and economy needs time to grow to increase lump of labor there might be time where lump of labor starts shrinking.
Lots of currently held jobs are pretty much useless already but can't be removed in business as usual mode due to various social agreements.
US economy used crisis as an excuse to shake off lots of them. Output regrew fast after crisis but jobs didn't come back.
This posting just spoke to me on so many levels. I've personally had a beer thrown in my face by someone who's job I destroyed. I really believe we are have started to eat our own tails.
Approximately 70% of the current jobs can (and will) be automated but what does that mean for my grandkids. How will we as a society cope with >20% unemployment never mind > 40%.
A big thing people has said is simply to make people work less. Sure it's "less efficient", but if that's what it takes to at least allow people the chance to work, so be it. Who cares about efficiency if we have people starving in the streets anyways.
150 years ago the agricultural sector employed roughly 80% of American workers. Today, it employs less than 3%. It may be hard to imagine looking forward rather than back, but dynamic economies are capable of experiencing such dramatic shifts AND of absorbing and reallocating the labor towards more productive uses. They key thing to understand is that once certain modes of production become less efficient relative to alternatives, often because of technological advances, it frees our resources and productive energies to engage in new enterprises. It's true that employment dislocations that occur from rapid technological advancement can cause great transitional distress; that is why it's important as a society that we find humane and efficient ways of supporting people through these changes. However, the net result of progress is that we are all better off. No one can say exactly what the baristas or the project managers of today will become, no more than anyone could have predicted what would have become of the farmworkers who were displaced in the great migration towards a service economy. But, the last 150 years have seen a veritable explosion in the specialization and profusion of occupations which were previously economically unviable. I see no reason why we should not expect the same kind of evolution going forward.
What happens when machines are stronger, have greater endurance, and are cheaper than humans? What happens when machines are smarter, faster, make less mistakes, and are cheaper than humans?
The "same kind of evolution" is no longer ours -- it belongs to the machines. How does your optimism work when most human effort is simply obsolete?
Wow, I wrote this post and it's gotten more points than my cumulative HN karma. But it's also gotten better discussion than anything I've ever posted to HN, so I'm totally okay with that. Thanks, guise, this is fun.
I've been reading a few of these articles lately, and I really enjoyed your first person perspective on what is otherwise being dubbed "Technological Unemployment".
I'm wondering if you think that a re-localized economy, namely one created around the local production of food through urban farms could be a viable way to offset the growing problem of unemployment.
Instead of job destruction, you could say we're just becoming more efficient at doing things. This is nothing new, it's a trend that started with division of labor in the Stone Age. Then we invented currency to distribute the fruits of this divided labor somewhat evenly among the participants. Now we're seeing that the value and income gap between professions is becoming wider and wider, and it's developing into a real problem.
Some proposed fixes like raising the minimum wage will only work temporarily, as it increases the pressure to become more efficient. A basic income might indeed be a better approach, but the problem is that we'll have a lower class of bored, but somewhat poor people. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think Europe's "social market economies" with high taxes and high benefits are in a better position to handle this than the US's gung-ho capitalism.
And to say that higher-level languages and open source products are making software engineers obsolete is a bit short sighted. Sure, languages and frameworks have become more powerful, but the problems to solve have become orders of magnitude harder, and new problems have arisen. You still need people proficient in lower level languages to build those high level tools and frameworks.
I wouldn't worry too much about destroying jobs - at least as far as the tech market is concerned. For every tech job that's destroyed, is seems at the very least 1 new job is created. Engineers should be flexible to take advantage of these new job opportunities.
For example once the mobile market started booming, lots of people wanted apps for their devices, ergo lots of jobs were (and still are) "created" to build those apps. Eventually the mobile platform as we know it will whither and some other platform will take it's place, requiring many new applications build with different technology and techniques (computer languages, design paradigms, etc...).
I keep hearing people say this... yet I'm confused. The operational goal of companies (and industry) as a whole is to continually increase efficiency to reap more profits.
If you take a step back, and just look at the entire machine, it seems frivolous for any industry to make investments in technology, given that your statement is true.
The big telecom I worked for was trying to automate their customer service, I highly doubt they would make the investment in the technology if they expected rehire the equivalent amount of layoffs.
Anyway, if I'm off point or misunderstanding some key mechanism at play, I'd love to be a bit more enlightened, because your opinion seems to be the dominant one.
After all, if you're creating value, I don't think you can go wrong in the grand scheme of things. Destroyed (usually more tedious) jobs means people as a whole are now free to do more interesting and creative tasks.
I'd happily destroy my job of doing the dishes with a dishwasher (one that fills and empties itself too) by automating it, etc.
After finding some way to be retrained. And good luck getting back into the job market if you're 50 and have been displaced from an industry you've worked in for most of your life.
(It creates new jobs, but it doesn't necessarily mean the displaced get those new jobs.)
My thinking about this is that people are both sellers of a product (their labor) and human beings. I think this is what got way too mixed up in the Marxist framing of socialism and needs to be unwound.
I don't think people should have rights qua producers. Acer doesn't have the right to have people buy their products, their purpose in our society to produce a good value proposition for computers. If nobody wants what's on offer, they can and should go out of business. Otherwise they're wasting resources that could have gone to their superior competitors. The same goes for a redundant worker.
But qua humans, I think people should have tons of rights! I think people should have equal opportunities (I'm thinking especially of children and how unfair life is to those with poor parents), and in addition, I honestly don't think someone should have to go hungry or homeless no matter what they do.
A basic income serves not to replace capitalism with socialism (in the Marxist sense) but to work in concert with capitalism to make sure nobody is ever dehumanized by a process that makes us all richer.
By this logic, anyone who improves anything is a job destroyer. One small team of factory workers can ruin thousands of blacksmith careers. One good therapist may wipe out an entire local industry for divorce lawyers. A single medical research scientist could prevent countless would-be morticians and undertakers from ever discovering their true calling.
The solution to joblessness seems simple: We just need to ensure that no one ever does anything important.
Sure, we can’t destroy all the non-Job Destroyer jobs… yet. Burger King and Starbucks still need human subjects employees to make Whoppers and skinny lattes, but how long before these jobs are deskilled to the point they can be done by machines — i.e., by software?
Interestingly, there is a robotics company in SF (Momentum Machines) that is trying to automate fast food (burger) assembly.
I will always remember my first project at my first job out of school. The project manager sat down the team to explain the goals of the project. My company made digital asset management software, and it had sold a license to a major client.
It was pitched to the team like this: "The client has already announced to shareholders that this project is going to lay off 20 people, so we need to get it done by such-and-such date."
I felt really awesome about those poor smucks who got unemployed partially due to my work. As programmers at our best can create whole new industries, but most of what we do is automate repetitive tasks.
That's good for productivity, but might not be an unvarnished good for society if the gains are not distributed in a fair manner.
Paul Krugman has written a lot lately about "capital-biased technological progress" and potential remedies.
Some coffee shops still have manual espresso machines, which require training, skill and finesse to operate.
I worked at two different Starbucks a decade ago and have used the manual machines. They require a tiny bit of manual labor and attention but not really an special amount of skill and finesse. Anyone that can learn to make a scrambled egg can do it. I was in high school at the time.
Let's not romanticize this crap. Most of these jobs we are destroying aren't that special. And people will be forced to focus on learning more useful skills.
I think there needs to be a revolution on training people for work and careers. There are a lot of jobs in the US currently that cannot be filled, we don't have enough skilled workers. It seems like displaced workers should have the option of getting into some kind of fast-track training to enter these roles, at no cost to them and while keeping their family fed.
The countries that figure out how to do this fairly, effectively, and without crazy costs will be unstoppable.
Also I think moderate mental health issues are a massive economic problem that nobody seems to notice but I don't know how to fix that.
[+] [-] columbo|13 years ago|reply
I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like in thirty years. All we know is the genie is out of the bottle and nobody is going to put it back in.
Maybe we're headed for a dystopic corporatist future where everything is monitored, calculated and automated to such a degree that people are simply told what to buy at regular intervals. Mass acceptance will lead to computers dictating through goal posting, achievements and leaderboards the vast majority of each individual's lives.
Maybe we'll simply have 80% unemployment; towering concrete skyscrapers that would rival the soviet era Paneláks with automated trains sending food in and taking waste out. Like a human powered coal plant. The vast numbers of unemployed will churn daily riots and huge sections of the country will be under military control. There will be an unspoken but utterly clear separation between the decision makers and those in the bread lines.
Maybe we'll come up with entirely new sectors in biology, space and automation which will usher in the real space-age of humanity.
My hope: We'll make some breakthroughs in science, mathematics, medicine and technology. New sectors will be created that nobody ever thought of, a few new billionaires will be added to the pile, our quality of life will improve and the threat of our complete and utter demise will have been greatly exaggerated.
[+] [-] simonsarris|13 years ago|reply
The anthropological world has gone through several ages as far as I can see it, from an Agricultural to Industrial to Mechanized (post WWII) to Digital (post 1990). I made up the names, but I'm sure the paradigms are obvious.
I want to make it clear that this "crisis of abundance" is not exactly a new question. Even moving to agrarian living had growing pains. The best example philosophically detailing this, I think, is the work by Thomas Paine called Agrarian Justice. (that's the same Paine as Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Age of Reason)
Agrarian Justice is a short pamphlet that I think everyone should read. It details in simple terms how civilized society is different from those who live off the land (such as some Native Americans of the time). Civilization clearly makes some people much better off, but others in civilization seem to be much worse off, condemned to lives of destitution, pollution, etc.
Land ownership and development is a clear plus, but in agrarian societies people "lose" their natural inheritance of the land because of this ownership, and land taxes should be levied to make up for the loss of a natural inheritance.
In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society.
Nothing was done in 1795, and little to the same effect is being done today, though ownership has become a lot more pronounced (we are no longer largely farmers after all). Unfortunately, I think society today would think the idea far more radical than those of Paine's generation, not least of which we owe to certain political elements.
A copy of the pamphlet is hosted on - where else - the official US Social Security website. I really do recommend you give it a read, it isn't long!
http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html
(If we want to discuss the pamplet itself in depth, we might want to do so on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5360056)
[+] [-] wwweston|13 years ago|reply
Another Marxist philosopher, eh?
Forced contribution backed up by violence of the state doesn't sound like justice to me, and is fundamentally incompatible with the liberty envisioned by America's founding fathers. If only we'd listen to them, we'd all be better off.
Edit: my delivery is either a bit too deadpan, or HN readers have encountered enough would-be libertarians who are completely unaware that Paine is arguably a founding father and Marx wasn't borne until 1818 that my attempt at satire has already been beaten by reality. I'll hope it's the former.
[+] [-] _delirium|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchrisa|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sirmixalot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hessenwolf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beatpanda|13 years ago|reply
And let's say you're like the OP, and you're feeling a little bit guilty that you're putting people out of work, and making it harder for people to meet their own basic needs in other ways.
Instead of arguing that we should all pay more taxes, tax yourself. Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.
It's called Noblesse Oblige. It used to be a thing. It ought to be again.
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beatpanda|13 years ago|reply
I care more about the immediate social fabric I live in than the relative poverty of people in other places. It's because I think that other social problems are merely symptoms of a mindset that allows people to think of themselves as seperate from the social fabric where they live.
I believe the way we solve the problem laid out in the OP is by creating resilient local communities that can take care of their own needs with minimal resource input, and I believe that geographic arbitrage and global division of labor have created many of the problems that responses to this post have suggested my money is better spent alleviating.
I further believe that when we solve social problems in our own commuities, we create templates for action that can be used by others, and that this is more efficient than using charity to impose solutions for social problems from without.
Lastly, I think anybody who thinks of themselves as an island, disconnected from the people and place immediately surrounding them, is delusional.
[+] [-] cbr|13 years ago|reply
[1] and you should: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...
[2] http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-dir...
[3] http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF
[+] [-] eru|13 years ago|reply
Similar to the roommate. That's just helping one random guy.
That's all fine. But there are better uses for your money to help humanity. Give to Doctors without Borders, or so.
[+] [-] jvm|13 years ago|reply
Details: http://www.givewell.org/giving101/Your-dollar-goes-further-o...
[+] [-] canweriotnow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|13 years ago|reply
More like blatant PR by aristocratic nobility.
[+] [-] minimax|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|13 years ago|reply
"...We (programmers) all are, on some level or another; we’re taking mundane repetitive tasks and automating them with code..."
Yes, and no. I have been programming or improving things all my life. That means, if you don't look too deeply, yes, I am a jobs destroyer.
But if you're not going to look too deeply, just don't bother looking at all.
We programmers take inefficient things and make them efficient. Old, bloated code gets streamlined. What used to take a person an hour takes five minutes.
You'd think -- if you kind of squinted your eyes the right way -- that eventually we'd just make the entire universe efficient and there would be no more jobs. You'd think something and it would come into existence. Many people are able to think this far ahead, and it scares them. Along, presumably, with many other things.
The problem is that such simple-minded projections of the future never pan out that way. Over and over again we make something more efficient, take away entire categories of jobs, and still people have more to do than ever. Why? There's a book in that response, but let's just say in deference to Jurassic Park, "jobs find a way". An economy is a complex system where people are always wanting something -- even when they're fed, clothed, housed, and taken care of -- and other people are always providing it. They trade, and it's this species-programmed pattern of trading that led us out of the Savannah and onto the moon.
This is the nth article along the same lines -- the future is devoid of jobs. I'm very sorry that our educational system in many western countries is ill-preparing many for work, and they face long periods of unemployment made worse by debt. It's a travesty and a scandal and we need to fix it. But don't extrapolate current unfortunate structural unemployment with the end of life, the universe, and everything. Don't flatter yourself. You are not a jobs destroyer. You're just some schmuck doing his job like the rest of us.
[+] [-] yairchu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcgwiz|13 years ago|reply
It's more that improvements in information processing generally (over the long-term) raise all boats, and do not fundamentally alter capitalism's competitive essence. Increasingly complex information processing can be automated, but that just moves the competition to a different playing field (er, boat pond). Until computers can create optimal, marketable solutions to novel problems, competition will always provide jobs for humans. They will just be different jobs.
[+] [-] contingencies|13 years ago|reply
Where does the western world want to go today? The government surveillance dyastopia and endless drone-wars of Assange's Cypherpunks introduction (http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm) or some kind of free education, basic income guaranteed, relative socialist utopia? A false dichotomy, for sure, but extremely worrisome in its validity nonetheless.
In short, it is fantastic and timely (as always) to see programmers thinking about social impact of their actions. More of this!
[+] [-] jboynyc|13 years ago|reply
Then you'll want to read "Four Futures."[1] It isn't by a programmer, but it has sci-fi references and the author talks about 3d printing. It's so brilliant I can never recommend it enough.
[+] [-] somlor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|13 years ago|reply
I know for a fact if a basic income surfaced I would jump immediately into solving a long-run "big problem" like learning robotics, brain-computer interfaces, etc. Without the burden of having to seek someone to pay me for my time to eat, I'd go tackle what I cared about more than what people with money to feed me cared about. I think that would have pervasive implications on everyone, and with a necessary cultural shift away from consumption towards conceptualization and self actualization, we might be able to get a majority of people taking up creative endeavors to improve the world in ways our current economic engine doesn't come close to promoting.
[+] [-] trippy_biscuits|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CurtMonash|13 years ago|reply
1. What effect will technology-based efficiency gains have on total wealth? 2. What effect will technology-based efficiency gains have on the distribution of total wealth? 3. What should we do about #1 and #2, especially #2?
The answer to #1, IMO, remains very favorable. And I think that's obvious so long as you measure wealth by the value and owner-/consumer-perceived quality of what is owned and consumed, rather than by market prices.
As for #2 -- a rising tide is clearly lifting a lot of boats worldwide. In the richer countries, that's more debatable -- but I think it's still true. Dollar incomes may be flat, inflation-adjusted, but electronic entertainment (for example) is a lot better than it used to be.
But it's hard to deny that income disparities are on the rise. And it's reasonable to think about those income disparities in part by counting numbers of "good" jobs (probably down) and (of which there are fewer) "great" jobs (probably up).
Historically, "good" jobs have arisen to more than make up for those lost, perhaps after an uncomfortable transition period. If that's what's going on again, we can muddle through without great answers to #3. But if This Time It's Different -- and it well may be -- then we need to reorganize our economy, our work practices, and everything else, rebalancing work/leisure in the way some people (often socialists) were already (and falsely) arguing was necessary decades ago.
--------------------------------------------
And finally -- at a minimum, we're causing problems that society needs to deal with in terms of general job loss. We're also causing other problems, such as privacy threats. So it's our duty, as very fortunate individuals, to also put some effort into alleviating them, or in some other ways of improving the world.
I, of course, have put some effort into the privacy issue. (http://www.dbms2.com/category/liberty-privacy/page/2/ -- more coming soon). Others may look at general economics (e.g. the OP here), or censorship, or the need for better STEM teaching, or in unquestionably beneficial applications of technology, or whatever. But we all should be thinking of what, personally, we can do to try to help.
[+] [-] aspensmonster|13 years ago|reply
Now, whether It's Different This Time because of characteristics inherent to a steadily improving economic system, or simply because of self-destructive tendencies that wealth-hoarding tends to exhibit, is a question I'd love an answer to. But I'm sure there will be others to tell me that this time is just like all the others too. Maybe I'll hear a decent explanation that allays my concerns.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|13 years ago|reply
Then came the oil shocks, which led to a completely different politics: neoliberalism, or, an economy once-again organized around maximizing capital gains rather than net earnings.
[+] [-] qu4z-2|13 years ago|reply
> so long as you measure wealth by the value and owner-/consumer-perceived quality of what is owned and consumed
What about things that aren't really owned or consumed? Clean air/water, forests. Do they factor into this function somehow? If not, I have difficulty trusting any suggestions based on that definition of "wealth".
And just in general, I'd much rather optimise for happiness than wealth. But it's much harder to quantify, so I guess that's why people don't.
[+] [-] holmak|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|13 years ago|reply
Given that we automate things faster and faster and economy needs time to grow to increase lump of labor there might be time where lump of labor starts shrinking.
Lots of currently held jobs are pretty much useless already but can't be removed in business as usual mode due to various social agreements.
US economy used crisis as an excuse to shake off lots of them. Output regrew fast after crisis but jobs didn't come back.
[+] [-] eru|13 years ago|reply
If you ignore the author's prescription, their analysis reads quite well.
[+] [-] darrenrogan|13 years ago|reply
Approximately 70% of the current jobs can (and will) be automated but what does that mean for my grandkids. How will we as a society cope with >20% unemployment never mind > 40%.
[+] [-] rtpg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkonowitch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wvenable|13 years ago|reply
The "same kind of evolution" is no longer ours -- it belongs to the machines. How does your optimism work when most human effort is simply obsolete?
[+] [-] canweriotnow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ar4s|13 years ago|reply
I've been reading a few of these articles lately, and I really enjoyed your first person perspective on what is otherwise being dubbed "Technological Unemployment".
I'm wondering if you think that a re-localized economy, namely one created around the local production of food through urban farms could be a viable way to offset the growing problem of unemployment.
[+] [-] smartician|13 years ago|reply
Some proposed fixes like raising the minimum wage will only work temporarily, as it increases the pressure to become more efficient. A basic income might indeed be a better approach, but the problem is that we'll have a lower class of bored, but somewhat poor people. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think Europe's "social market economies" with high taxes and high benefits are in a better position to handle this than the US's gung-ho capitalism.
And to say that higher-level languages and open source products are making software engineers obsolete is a bit short sighted. Sure, languages and frameworks have become more powerful, but the problems to solve have become orders of magnitude harder, and new problems have arisen. You still need people proficient in lower level languages to build those high level tools and frameworks.
[+] [-] wsc981|13 years ago|reply
For example once the mobile market started booming, lots of people wanted apps for their devices, ergo lots of jobs were (and still are) "created" to build those apps. Eventually the mobile platform as we know it will whither and some other platform will take it's place, requiring many new applications build with different technology and techniques (computer languages, design paradigms, etc...).
[+] [-] ar4s|13 years ago|reply
If you take a step back, and just look at the entire machine, it seems frivolous for any industry to make investments in technology, given that your statement is true.
The big telecom I worked for was trying to automate their customer service, I highly doubt they would make the investment in the technology if they expected rehire the equivalent amount of layoffs.
Anyway, if I'm off point or misunderstanding some key mechanism at play, I'd love to be a bit more enlightened, because your opinion seems to be the dominant one.
[+] [-] shurcooL|13 years ago|reply
After all, if you're creating value, I don't think you can go wrong in the grand scheme of things. Destroyed (usually more tedious) jobs means people as a whole are now free to do more interesting and creative tasks.
I'd happily destroy my job of doing the dishes with a dishwasher (one that fills and empties itself too) by automating it, etc.
[+] [-] damncabbage|13 years ago|reply
(It creates new jobs, but it doesn't necessarily mean the displaced get those new jobs.)
[+] [-] jvm|13 years ago|reply
I don't think people should have rights qua producers. Acer doesn't have the right to have people buy their products, their purpose in our society to produce a good value proposition for computers. If nobody wants what's on offer, they can and should go out of business. Otherwise they're wasting resources that could have gone to their superior competitors. The same goes for a redundant worker.
But qua humans, I think people should have tons of rights! I think people should have equal opportunities (I'm thinking especially of children and how unfair life is to those with poor parents), and in addition, I honestly don't think someone should have to go hungry or homeless no matter what they do.
A basic income serves not to replace capitalism with socialism (in the Marxist sense) but to work in concert with capitalism to make sure nobody is ever dehumanized by a process that makes us all richer.
[+] [-] kevinskii|13 years ago|reply
The solution to joblessness seems simple: We just need to ensure that no one ever does anything important.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|13 years ago|reply
Interestingly, there is a robotics company in SF (Momentum Machines) that is trying to automate fast food (burger) assembly.
http://www.businessinsider.com/burger-robot-could-revolution...
[+] [-] 100k|13 years ago|reply
It was pitched to the team like this: "The client has already announced to shareholders that this project is going to lay off 20 people, so we need to get it done by such-and-such date."
I felt really awesome about those poor smucks who got unemployed partially due to my work. As programmers at our best can create whole new industries, but most of what we do is automate repetitive tasks.
That's good for productivity, but might not be an unvarnished good for society if the gains are not distributed in a fair manner.
Paul Krugman has written a lot lately about "capital-biased technological progress" and potential remedies.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/capital-biased-t...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/policy-implicati...
[+] [-] naner|13 years ago|reply
I worked at two different Starbucks a decade ago and have used the manual machines. They require a tiny bit of manual labor and attention but not really an special amount of skill and finesse. Anyone that can learn to make a scrambled egg can do it. I was in high school at the time.
Let's not romanticize this crap. Most of these jobs we are destroying aren't that special. And people will be forced to focus on learning more useful skills.
I think there needs to be a revolution on training people for work and careers. There are a lot of jobs in the US currently that cannot be filled, we don't have enough skilled workers. It seems like displaced workers should have the option of getting into some kind of fast-track training to enter these roles, at no cost to them and while keeping their family fed.
The countries that figure out how to do this fairly, effectively, and without crazy costs will be unstoppable.
Also I think moderate mental health issues are a massive economic problem that nobody seems to notice but I don't know how to fix that.