>The Luddites tried futilely to stop progress that benefited society
Luddites were not anti-technology nor were they anti progress. They destroyed technology as a tactic to raise the price of the more automated competition. Their competition made cheaper, crappier equivalents of their artisanal work made with de-skilled McJob equivalent workers whose wages were pressured to abhorrent levels (via other means like the enclosure movement/Napoleonic wars).
Similarly, people who strike are not "futilely trying to stop the existence of work". It's another tactic.
In a way, the Luddites are pretty similar to the anti-H1B crowd of hacker news.
>Before these technological advancements, workers enjoyed mini-monopolies.
This is a hacky way of looking at it but the conclusion sort of works. It makes much more sense to look at relative market power of employees vs. employers rather than use the all-or-nothing terminology of monopoly vs. perfect competition.
If Amazon workers attempt to sabotage Amazon's stock picking machinery, I expect it will result in an increase in wages, much like it did for the Luddites. They will be called Luddites, but similar to the original Luddites, they kind of only really have a problem with technology that is used to control them.
> Their competition made cheaper, crappier equivalents of their artisanal work made with de-skilled McJob equivalent workers whose wages were pressured to abhorrent levels
... which enabled working-class people to own fairly large amounts of clothing for the first time, and even have fashionable clothing, which had once been the exclusive preserve of the rich.
Don't try to paint this as all rich-vs-poor. The poor got a lot out of mechanization, even at the time, and reforming that system worked out a lot better than trying to work with people who were so threatened by change they would destroy other peoples' method of earning a living.
In a way, the Luddites are pretty similar to the anti-H1B crowd of hacker news.
I'd describe it a bit differently. The anti-H1B crowd here is typically (not exclusively [1]) like the old Jim Crow/New Deal/Chinese Exclusion crowd - wanting to pass laws to reduce competition by people who have had a different accident of birth.
I'm curious to see if anyone can cook up an argument why protectionism against orange, white and green is morally justified, but protectionism against black is not.
[1] Some people, (including myself), have non-protectionist opposition (or at least reservations about) to immigration. I'm very unsettled that my reservations could also justify anti-black protectionism if the same empirical criteria were satisfied.
Yes. I refer to the Amazon warehouse operation as "Machines should think. People should work". All the thinking is done by computers and robots. Watch one of the Kiva robot videos that shows the human picker reaching where the laser pointer tells them to reach, waving the item under the scanner, and putting the object in the bin where the light is on.
Nobody hires people because robots can do it cheaper, so no one has a job, so no one can buy anything, so no robots do those things that they could do cheaper.
The technology doesn't even have to exist to cause poor-world. Only be possible.
I knew about Kiva and the widescale automation in warehousing but I had no idea the UI was so...simple. I see no reason the person couldn't be taken out of the loop completely here with a robotic arm.
How will anyone purchase anything if they don't have money from a job because robotics and software can do the job better? Basic income?
Or are we resigned to a dystopian future where the landscape is covered by Amazon fulfillment centers sitting silent, stocked to the ceiling with product that can't be sold because no one can afford said merchandise?
It's a good reminder that social and technological progress must often be fought for separately.
The market is brutal when applied to people. Worker fungibility is a value add for the company, and yet it drops wages to the minimum, since the worker's individual bargaining power is practically non-existent. The traditional answer is unions, but even that becomes impractical as the cost of replacing a worker approaches zero.
This is especially relevant when the buzzwords of the day are crowdsourcing and independent contracting. Are we really making things more efficient and creating value, or are we just helping drive down the wages of people that already have a hard time scraping by?
This kind of thing makes me sad. We know that one of the things people need to feel satisfied is a degree of autonomy. And by taking that away and treating them as a commoditized component in some machine you're taking away a lot more than you realize from them.
The essence of the article is about effectiveness of technology/trade in reducing the 'gaps' between the capabilities of workers/artisans results in lowering their average compensation. But I think there's something missing. Professor Katz famously suggested not to become scientists [1] because getting your research funded becomes top priority than the assurance that 'all you'll do is research'. In a way, since we live in a society, workers need to feel personally responsible for /constantly/ finding the appropriateness (value) of their skills and elevate them as necessary to make sure they have a steady income and their craft is still valued by 'customers'. If you stagnate there, then you will gradually (or rapidly) become replaceable. And as you age, being indispensable becomes harder. So, perhaps, it makes sense to learn things that ensure stability of demand for your skills.
When I discuss 'Policies and Procedures' (including but not limited to tech like the OP's Amazon example) I often refer to "Plug and Play" staff [1]. If, for any reason, an employee leaves a position then the business is able to replace them with minimum fuss. The more the role can depend on technology, the more 'true' this is, but it needn't be seen as tech-specific.
Staff of course have a different view as to their "fungibility". I tend to overcome this in two ways:
First, "If you can't be replaced then you can't be promoted." That resonates a lot.
Second, I replace the 'Bus Factor'[2] context with the 'Lottery Factor'. More directly, "How many of you, if you won $35M in Powerball, would still be working here next year? So let's plan for at least one of you to win the lottery."
(They're not bad at maths, they get that it's the same conversation as being hit by a bus, but the energetic flip leads to faster engagement in the process.)
I don't understand the argument that just because technological progress in the past has led to higher wages and employment (indeed, it actually hasn't always) that it's a given that this will always happen.
It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. There has been no other time in human history when ALL low-skill labor was in the process of being automated in such a generalized way.
While it is certainly true that there is and always has been huge economic pressure on low-skill labor to be destroyed, it is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate and the economic forces that are destroying it don't seem to be creating any residual low-skill labor (like the assembly line, etc did). Making sure that the labor force is educated enough to not need the low-skill labor is good, and it is undeniable that everybody is getting more educated. Still, I worry a great many people are going to get left out in the dark.
> Making sure that the labor force is educated enough to not need the low-skill labor is good, and it is undeniable that everybody is getting more educated.
That's very deniable in the US. The rising cost of education and lack of government funding for education means that many, many people are not getting more educated.
To be more precise, it's not actually 'low-skill' labor that is vulnerable - it's 'routine' labor that is. Autor and Acemoglu talk about this in their paper 'Skills, Tasks and Technologies':
'Following, ALM, we refer to these procedural, rule-based activities to which computers are currently well-suited as "routine" tasks. By routine, we do not mean mundane (e.g., washing dishes) but rather sufficiently
well understood that the task can be fully specified as a series of instructions to be executed by a machine (e.g., adding a column of numbers).
Routine tasks are characteristic of many middle-skilled cognitive and manual jobs, such as bookkeeping, clerical work, repetitive production, and monitoring jobs. Because the core job tasks of these occupations follow precise, well-understood procedures, they can be (and increasingly are) codified
in computer software and performed by machines.'
"It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. "
I'm not sure this is restricted to low-wage labor. There are plenty of low-wage jobs that are just complex enough to make automation more expensive than wages for the near future. Driving is a good example here (for now).
And there's plenty of high-wage jobs which are quite automatable - accounting (TurboTax), financial management (wealthfront/betterment), lots of software operations work (AWS tools), etc.
> There has been no other time in human history when ALL low-skill labor was in the process of being automated in such a generalized way.
Resist hindsight bias here; the work we consider low-skill today--working in factories--was the high-skilled labor of its day. The low-skill labor it replaced was largely the large-scale manual labors of raising food, producing energy, and making basic everyday items.
The need for more educated, better trained, smarter workers during the Industrial Revolution led directly to the establishment of free, publicly funded schools for all through high school. That was a major cultural shift, a huge public investment, and a huge jump in the mental capabilities of the workforce as a whole.
I think it's arguable that now we're facing another similar shift, and we need to make another jump in how we educate people. The number of people who get left behind depends on how well we recognize and commit to this shift.
I would argue that a starting point is to accept that the economy is changing, and we have to do something to prepare everyone for that. Wishing that textile or car factories would go back to centers of mass employment won't really protect anyone.
This is why we should support basic-income or minimum-income.
Then NO ONE is left out to starve, ever. People would still get jobs to get MORE money, because people always want more, but you could eliminate minimum/living wage laws, so the marginal cost of production at jobs that people enjoyed could actually go down, while at the same time more people would have money to spend.
Spreadsheets made it easier/possible for "users" (accountants) to write financial "programs", reducing the need for custom development of financial software. If there are more innovations like spreadsheets, there will be less or different needs for programmers as the labor category exists today. Fungibility cuts both ways.
My experience is the need for programmers rapidly increases under those conditions because
1) New capabilities and demonstrations of capabilities mean its easier to make the new thing a business requirement, now implemented and supported by IT.
2) Labor required to do something vs skill level in programming scales way beyond linear, maybe exponential. So pay a genius 10 hours of labor at 3x pay, your average grunt "real programmer" 50 hours at 2x pay, or front line sorcerers apprentice doesn't even have programmer in his job title 250 hours at 1x pay to do it in a spreadsheet.
3) Sorcerers apprentices have no idea how to use tools making them incredibly inefficient both in calculating results and the immense labor they expend for their result. The most expensive way to get a result is to pay people who have no idea what they're doing.
Workers becoming more fungible happens even in creative domains. For example, I've heard several companies cite how advances in sales software have dramatically reduced the training time for new sales people as well as reducing the gap between top performers and everyone else.
People who kept doing things the old inefficient way will see their wages go down.
If a worker can make ten times the widgets with newer technology, the amount that can be charged per widget, and thus the amount a worker can be paid to produce each one, has to drop eventually.
Of course, the upside is that the worker thatchers up with technology eventually gets their widgets for 1/10 of the cost.
And this is literally true. Cars, for example, used to cost ten times as much. You can buy a car as reliable as any 1914 model for a few hundred bucks that is more efficient and cheaper to maintain. You can also start it without getting out of the car.
And as the inefficient workers get outcompeted and more skilled competition shows up, the end result is always the same: new widget costs 1/10 of the original costs, those who make them earn the same amount of money as they did before, but now 9/10 of workers are without a job. It has always been like that and it's responsible for the age of plenty we live in - but the problem of today is that those 9/10 of workers without a job are increasingly unable to find another one, as everything gets slowly automated away.
Those that can 'defer to the machine' are going to do better in many jobs (that will remain) in the future. This is a big part of Cowen's "Average is Over." Here's a good review of it which goes into that aspect of it:
'The moral Cowen draws from freestyle chess is that the winners of these games, and he extrapolates, the economic “games” of the future, are those human beings who are most willing to defer to the decisions of the machine. I find this conclusion more than a little chilling given we’re talk about real people here rather than Knight or Pawns, but Cowen seems to think it’s just common sense.
In its simplest form Cowen’s argument boils down to the prediction that an increasing amount of human work in the future will come in the form of these AI-human teams. Some of this, he admits, will amount to no workers at all with the human part of the “team” reduced to an unpaid customer. I now almost always scan and bag my own goods at the grocery store, just as I can’t remember the last time I actually spoke to a bank teller who wasn’t my mom. Cowen also admits that the rise of AI might mean the world actually gets “dumber” our interactions with our environment simplified to foster smooth integration with machines and compressed to meet their limits.
In his vision intelligent machines will revolutionize everything from medicine to education to business management and negotiation to love. The human beings who will best thrive in this new environment will be those whose work best complements that of intelligent machines, and this will be the case all the way from the factory floor to the classroom. Intelligent machines should improve human judgement in areas such as medical diagnostics and would even replace judges in the courtroom if we are ever willing to take the constitutional plunge. Teachers will go from educators to “coaches” as intelligent machines allow individualized instruction , but education will still require a human touch when it comes to motivating students.'
I remember talking to a few people in high school about me studying CS because I wanted to become a developer.
They all my IT-friends were like, "Don't do it man. No one needs new software! Better be an administrator, in the future they will be needed to manage all the IT stuff that already exists, but there will hardly be anything new on the marked!"
That was 2003, right before the social and mobile boom.
IT departments are threatened, but it's really not Docker doing it. Docker is somewhere down the list behind AWS/GCE/Rackspace, Chef/Puppet, Mesos/Deis/Flynn, and really good hosted Active Directory services.
[+] [-] crdoconnor|11 years ago|reply
Luddites were not anti-technology nor were they anti progress. They destroyed technology as a tactic to raise the price of the more automated competition. Their competition made cheaper, crappier equivalents of their artisanal work made with de-skilled McJob equivalent workers whose wages were pressured to abhorrent levels (via other means like the enclosure movement/Napoleonic wars).
Similarly, people who strike are not "futilely trying to stop the existence of work". It's another tactic.
In a way, the Luddites are pretty similar to the anti-H1B crowd of hacker news.
>Before these technological advancements, workers enjoyed mini-monopolies.
This is a hacky way of looking at it but the conclusion sort of works. It makes much more sense to look at relative market power of employees vs. employers rather than use the all-or-nothing terminology of monopoly vs. perfect competition.
If Amazon workers attempt to sabotage Amazon's stock picking machinery, I expect it will result in an increase in wages, much like it did for the Luddites. They will be called Luddites, but similar to the original Luddites, they kind of only really have a problem with technology that is used to control them.
[+] [-] cbd1984|11 years ago|reply
... which enabled working-class people to own fairly large amounts of clothing for the first time, and even have fashionable clothing, which had once been the exclusive preserve of the rich.
Don't try to paint this as all rich-vs-poor. The poor got a lot out of mechanization, even at the time, and reforming that system worked out a lot better than trying to work with people who were so threatened by change they would destroy other peoples' method of earning a living.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|11 years ago|reply
I'd describe it a bit differently. The anti-H1B crowd here is typically (not exclusively [1]) like the old Jim Crow/New Deal/Chinese Exclusion crowd - wanting to pass laws to reduce competition by people who have had a different accident of birth.
I'm curious to see if anyone can cook up an argument why protectionism against orange, white and green is morally justified, but protectionism against black is not.
[1] Some people, (including myself), have non-protectionist opposition (or at least reservations about) to immigration. I'm very unsettled that my reservations could also justify anti-black protectionism if the same empirical criteria were satisfied.
[+] [-] dominotw|11 years ago|reply
H1B crowd == de-skilled McJob equivalent workers ?
[+] [-] Animats|11 years ago|reply
Those people will be unemployed as soon as the Amazon Robot Picking Challenge (http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/) succeeds.
This is the future.
[+] [-] noonespecial|11 years ago|reply
Nobody hires people because robots can do it cheaper, so no one has a job, so no one can buy anything, so no robots do those things that they could do cheaper.
The technology doesn't even have to exist to cause poor-world. Only be possible.
Put me firmly in the basic minimum income camp.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|11 years ago|reply
http://youtu.be/Fr6Rco5A9SM?t=2m33s
I knew about Kiva and the widescale automation in warehousing but I had no idea the UI was so...simple. I see no reason the person couldn't be taken out of the loop completely here with a robotic arm.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|11 years ago|reply
Or are we resigned to a dystopian future where the landscape is covered by Amazon fulfillment centers sitting silent, stocked to the ceiling with product that can't be sold because no one can afford said merchandise?
[+] [-] tveita|11 years ago|reply
This dystopia has been envisioned for more than 80 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q030WNZvXrA
It's a good reminder that social and technological progress must often be fought for separately.
The market is brutal when applied to people. Worker fungibility is a value add for the company, and yet it drops wages to the minimum, since the worker's individual bargaining power is practically non-existent. The traditional answer is unions, but even that becomes impractical as the cost of replacing a worker approaches zero.
This is especially relevant when the buzzwords of the day are crowdsourcing and independent contracting. Are we really making things more efficient and creating value, or are we just helping drive down the wages of people that already have a hard time scraping by?
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3_nm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KedarMhaswade|11 years ago|reply
1- http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html
[+] [-] JacobAldridge|11 years ago|reply
Staff of course have a different view as to their "fungibility". I tend to overcome this in two ways:
First, "If you can't be replaced then you can't be promoted." That resonates a lot.
Second, I replace the 'Bus Factor'[2] context with the 'Lottery Factor'. More directly, "How many of you, if you won $35M in Powerball, would still be working here next year? So let's plan for at least one of you to win the lottery."
(They're not bad at maths, they get that it's the same conversation as being hit by a bus, but the energetic flip leads to faster engagement in the process.)
[1] Maybe I need a new Cloud metaphor?
[2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
[+] [-] chii|11 years ago|reply
that is a very sneaky way of saying that their wage/salary cannot increase.
[+] [-] hacknat|11 years ago|reply
It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. There has been no other time in human history when ALL low-skill labor was in the process of being automated in such a generalized way.
While it is certainly true that there is and always has been huge economic pressure on low-skill labor to be destroyed, it is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate and the economic forces that are destroying it don't seem to be creating any residual low-skill labor (like the assembly line, etc did). Making sure that the labor force is educated enough to not need the low-skill labor is good, and it is undeniable that everybody is getting more educated. Still, I worry a great many people are going to get left out in the dark.
[+] [-] copsarebastards|11 years ago|reply
That's very deniable in the US. The rising cost of education and lack of government funding for education means that many, many people are not getting more educated.
[+] [-] Futurebot|11 years ago|reply
'Following, ALM, we refer to these procedural, rule-based activities to which computers are currently well-suited as "routine" tasks. By routine, we do not mean mundane (e.g., washing dishes) but rather sufficiently well understood that the task can be fully specified as a series of instructions to be executed by a machine (e.g., adding a column of numbers). Routine tasks are characteristic of many middle-skilled cognitive and manual jobs, such as bookkeeping, clerical work, repetitive production, and monitoring jobs. Because the core job tasks of these occupations follow precise, well-understood procedures, they can be (and increasingly are) codified in computer software and performed by machines.'
[+] [-] ahupp|11 years ago|reply
I'm not sure this is restricted to low-wage labor. There are plenty of low-wage jobs that are just complex enough to make automation more expensive than wages for the near future. Driving is a good example here (for now).
And there's plenty of high-wage jobs which are quite automatable - accounting (TurboTax), financial management (wealthfront/betterment), lots of software operations work (AWS tools), etc.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|11 years ago|reply
Resist hindsight bias here; the work we consider low-skill today--working in factories--was the high-skilled labor of its day. The low-skill labor it replaced was largely the large-scale manual labors of raising food, producing energy, and making basic everyday items.
The need for more educated, better trained, smarter workers during the Industrial Revolution led directly to the establishment of free, publicly funded schools for all through high school. That was a major cultural shift, a huge public investment, and a huge jump in the mental capabilities of the workforce as a whole.
I think it's arguable that now we're facing another similar shift, and we need to make another jump in how we educate people. The number of people who get left behind depends on how well we recognize and commit to this shift.
I would argue that a starting point is to accept that the economy is changing, and we have to do something to prepare everyone for that. Wishing that textile or car factories would go back to centers of mass employment won't really protect anyone.
[+] [-] SomeCallMeTim|11 years ago|reply
Then NO ONE is left out to starve, ever. People would still get jobs to get MORE money, because people always want more, but you could eliminate minimum/living wage laws, so the marginal cost of production at jobs that people enjoyed could actually go down, while at the same time more people would have money to spend.
The transition is the hard part.
[+] [-] walterbell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbles|11 years ago|reply
Finance task :
> finance system to address task
> excel spreadsheet to address finance system shortcomings
> finance system to 'formalise' the spreadsheet
> excel spreadsheet to address finance system shortcomings
> finance system to 'formalise' the spreadsheet
etc...
[+] [-] VLM|11 years ago|reply
1) New capabilities and demonstrations of capabilities mean its easier to make the new thing a business requirement, now implemented and supported by IT.
2) Labor required to do something vs skill level in programming scales way beyond linear, maybe exponential. So pay a genius 10 hours of labor at 3x pay, your average grunt "real programmer" 50 hours at 2x pay, or front line sorcerers apprentice doesn't even have programmer in his job title 250 hours at 1x pay to do it in a spreadsheet.
3) Sorcerers apprentices have no idea how to use tools making them incredibly inefficient both in calculating results and the immense labor they expend for their result. The most expensive way to get a result is to pay people who have no idea what they're doing.
[+] [-] SatvikBeri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stretchwithme|11 years ago|reply
If a worker can make ten times the widgets with newer technology, the amount that can be charged per widget, and thus the amount a worker can be paid to produce each one, has to drop eventually.
[+] [-] stretchwithme|11 years ago|reply
And this is literally true. Cars, for example, used to cost ten times as much. You can buy a car as reliable as any 1914 model for a few hundred bucks that is more efficient and cheaper to maintain. You can also start it without getting out of the car.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Futurebot|11 years ago|reply
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20150109
Excerpt:
'The moral Cowen draws from freestyle chess is that the winners of these games, and he extrapolates, the economic “games” of the future, are those human beings who are most willing to defer to the decisions of the machine. I find this conclusion more than a little chilling given we’re talk about real people here rather than Knight or Pawns, but Cowen seems to think it’s just common sense.
In its simplest form Cowen’s argument boils down to the prediction that an increasing amount of human work in the future will come in the form of these AI-human teams. Some of this, he admits, will amount to no workers at all with the human part of the “team” reduced to an unpaid customer. I now almost always scan and bag my own goods at the grocery store, just as I can’t remember the last time I actually spoke to a bank teller who wasn’t my mom. Cowen also admits that the rise of AI might mean the world actually gets “dumber” our interactions with our environment simplified to foster smooth integration with machines and compressed to meet their limits.
In his vision intelligent machines will revolutionize everything from medicine to education to business management and negotiation to love. The human beings who will best thrive in this new environment will be those whose work best complements that of intelligent machines, and this will be the case all the way from the factory floor to the classroom. Intelligent machines should improve human judgement in areas such as medical diagnostics and would even replace judges in the courtroom if we are ever willing to take the constitutional plunge. Teachers will go from educators to “coaches” as intelligent machines allow individualized instruction , but education will still require a human touch when it comes to motivating students.'
[+] [-] politician|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|11 years ago|reply
They all my IT-friends were like, "Don't do it man. No one needs new software! Better be an administrator, in the future they will be needed to manage all the IT stuff that already exists, but there will hardly be anything new on the marked!"
That was 2003, right before the social and mobile boom.
[+] [-] eropple|11 years ago|reply