The Future of Work

JulieW · Jun 26, 2015

Worth considering the potentials:

In the past few years, even as the United States has pulled itself partway out of the jobs hole created by the Great Recession, some economists and technologists have warned that the economy is near a tipping point. When they peer deeply into labor-market data, they see troubling signs, masked for now by a cyclical recovery. And when they look up from their spreadsheets, they see automation high and lowrobots in the operating room and behind the fast-food counter. They imagine self-driving cars snaking through the streets and Amazon drones dotting the sky, replacing millions of drivers, warehouse stockers, and retail workers. They observe that the capabilities of machinesalready formidablecontinue to expand exponentially, while our own remain the same. And they wonder: Is any job truly safe?

Futurists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines' workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, that will mean a great many of life's necessities and luxuries will become ever cheaper, and it will mean great wealthat least when aggregated up to the level of the national economy.

But even leaving aside questions of how to distribute that wealth, the widespread disappearance of work would usher in a social transformation unlike any we've seen. If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America's unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country's politics, economics, and social interactions. What might happen if work goes away?

The U.S. labor force has been shaped by millennia of technological progress. Agricultural technology birthed the farming industry, the industrial revolution moved people into factories, and then globalization and automation moved them back out, giving rise to a nation of services. But throughout these reshufflings, the total number of jobs has always increased. What may be looming is something different: an era of technological unemployment, in which computer scientists and software engineers essentially invent us out of work, and the total number of jobs declines steadily and permanently.

This fear is not new. The hope that machines might free us from toil has always been intertwined with the fear that they will rob us of our agency. In the midst of the Great Depression, the economist John Maynard Keynes forecast that technological progress might allow a 15-hour workweek, and abundant leisure, by 2030. But around the same time, President Herbert Hoover received a letter warning that industrial technology was a "Frankenstein monster" that threatened to upend manufacturing, "devouring our civilization." (The letter came from the mayor of Palo Alto, of all places.) In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, "If men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work." But two years later, a committee of scientists and social activists sent an open letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson arguing that "the cybernation revolution" would create "a separate nation of the poor, the unskilled, the jobless," who would be unable either to find work or to afford life's necessities.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/
Click to expand...

deck-star · Jun 27, 2015

This is a hot topic I've heard a lot on podcasts recently. I've heard it in podcasts in the Financial, Tech and Miscellaneous categories. The common trend is they think it's coming sooner or later. The trend isn't new. My photographer friends and a typesetter friend lost their jobs due to new technology making their skills obsolete years ago. Perhaps the trend is increasing exponentially? I know they're trying to simplify the management of computer networks (my field), but their success here is limited so far.

SpacePete · Jun 27, 2015

deck-star said:

This is a hot topic I've heard a lot on podcasts recently. I've heard it in podcasts in the Financial, Tech and Miscellaneous categories. The common trend is they think it's coming sooner or later. The trend isn't new. My photographer friends and a typesetter friend lost their jobs due to new technology making their skills obsolete years ago. Perhaps the trend is increasing exponentially? I know they're trying to simplify the management of computer networks (my field), but their success here is limited so far.
Click to expand...

Arguably your photographer friends could have transitioned to digital technologies, Photoshop, online services, etc. This is the usual counter-argument, and often people will throw in a "Luddite" aspersion as if that settles the matter. More serious rebuttals will be a bit more specific:

(4) Theoretical Rebuttal: Economic theory suggests that the increased productivity from machine labour will reduce costs, increase demand, and expand opportunities for existing or novel forms of human labour.
(5) Evidential Rebuttal: Accumulated evidence, over the past 200 years, suggests that technological unemployment is at most a temporary problem: humans have always seemed to find other forms of work.
Click to expand...

But then there are counter arguments:

(7) The Outpacing Problem: The theoretical rebuttal assumes that the rate of technological improvement will not outpace the rate at which humans can retrain, upskill or create new job opportunities. But this is dubious. It is possible that the rate of technological development will outpace these human abilities.

For what it's worth, when JM Keynes first coined the term "technological unemployment", it was this outpacing problem that he had in mind. If machines displace human workers in one industry (e.g. manufacturing) but there are still jobs in other industries (e.g. computer programming), then it is theoretically possible for those workers (or future generations of workers) to train themselves to find jobs in those other industries. This would solve the temporary problem of automation. But this assumes that humans will have the time to develop those skills. In the computer age, we have witnessed exponential improvements in technology. It is possible that these exponential improvements will continue, and will mean that humans cannot redeploy their labour fast enough. Thus, I could encourage my children to train to become software engineers, but by the time they developed those skills, machines might be better software engineers than most humans.
Click to expand...

And some questions:

(8) The Inequality Problem: The technological infrastructure we have already created means that less human labour is needed to capture certain markets (even new ones). Thus, even if people do create new markets for new products and services, it won't translate into increased levels of employment.

(9) The Historical Data Problem: Proponents of the Luddite fallacy may be making unwarranted inferences from the historical data. It may be that, historically, technological improvements were always matched by corresponding improvements in the human ability to retrain and find new markets. But that's because we were looking at the relative linear portion of an exponential growth curve. As we now enter a period of rapid growth, things may be different.

(10) The Android Problem: Suppose androids could be created. These androids could do everything humans could do, only more efficiently (no illness, no boredom, no sleep) and at a reduced cost. In such a world, every rational economic actor would replace human labour with android labour. This would lead to technological unemployment.
Click to expand...

This is extracted from: http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/are-we-heading-for-technological.html

hawkeye · Jun 27, 2015

I'm sure this will be discussed a lot but I just wanted to throw in one thought I had along these lines.

I think that the last industry that will be taken over by machines is entertainment. If machines can actually be creative enough to actually provide us with satisfying entertainment then they will be for all intents and purposes human themselves. And if you look at the growth of the entertainment industry through all media for the last say 100 years, it is probably exponential with more people working in it now and more output than ever before.

SpacePete · Jun 27, 2015

hawkeye said:

I'm sure this will be discussed a lot but I just wanted to throw in one thought I had along these lines.

I think that the last industry that will be taken over by machines is entertainment. If machines can actually be creative enough to actually provide us with satisfying entertainment then they will be for all intents and purposes human themselves. And if you look at the growth of the entertainment industry through all media for the last say 100 years, it is probably exponential with more people working in it now and more output than ever before.
Click to expand...

Imagine some hypothetical software for a future iPhone or PC that could create all the music you wanted according to your particular preferences and feedback (feedback via the increasingly ubiquitous and sophisticated bio-monitoring gadgets that maybe one day could gage mood and physiological response to different compositions at different times for different activities.). That could destroy the music industry and they wouldn't go down without a fight.

Movie/TV creation might be far more difficult.

hawkeye · Jun 27, 2015

deck-star said:

This is a hot topic I've heard a lot on podcasts recently. I've heard it in podcasts in the Financial, Tech and Miscellaneous categories. The common trend is they think it's coming sooner or later. The trend isn't new. My photographer friends and a typesetter friend lost their jobs due to new technology making their skills obsolete years ago. Perhaps the trend is increasing exponentially? I know they're trying to simplify the management of computer networks (my field), but their success here is limited so far.
Click to expand...

I'm a programmer and it's been interesting to see the evolution of my field in the last decade or so. When I was started there was much more low-level work to be done, getting things to work, writing database access code, that kind of thing. Today, much of that is machine generated now and my work tends to be much higher level. There has been a huge boost in productivity also, things just get done much faster now and usually to much higher quality.

Log in or Sign up

The Future of Work

JulieW Well-Known Member Silver Stacker

deck-star New Member

SpacePete Well-Known Member Silver Stacker

hawkeye New Member Silver Stacker

SpacePete Well-Known Member Silver Stacker

hawkeye New Member Silver Stacker

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

The Future of Work

JulieW Well-Known Member Silver Stacker

deck-star New Member

SpacePete Well-Known Member Silver Stacker

hawkeye New Member Silver Stacker

SpacePete Well-Known Member Silver Stacker

hawkeye New Member Silver Stacker

Share This Page

Useful Searches