Maybe the ballsiest rhetoric about "all that" came out in 1930 - just as the Great Depression was setting in - by Lord John Maynard Keynes. In a short yet profound essay, "The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren," Keynes - a polymath - wrote that the end of the economic game was in sight, and that many wouldn't know what to do with themselves, that working three hours a day is quite enough for most people, and that a few will know how to live a life of leisure - the goal of a true liberal arts education - while others will have a rough go of it.
"I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs." - Keynes
Read this essay if you haven't before. (If it seems "tl/dr" skip to the II section.) He says that within 100 years this end of toil would be possible. As we write: 16 years and change from now. Which reminds me of a couple of studies that came out in the last 18 months.
We must know something about where we've been in order to understand where we are, and where we might be going.
We must know something about where we've been in order to understand where we are, and where we might be going.
Profs. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
A 98 page book appeared around January 23rd of 2012 titled Race Against The Machine. In a stunning move by an increasingly lame TV institution, 60 Minutes actually did a segment about technological unemployment that Brynjolfsson and McAfee had warned about, and allowed them on as talking heads. The segment featured much footage of robots in factories doing the work that humans previously did. Famous AI/roboticist Rodney Brooks is shown with one of his robots that can learn, pick up an object from the floor, works cheaper than a Chinese factory worker, can be programmed to do a new task by a human in a matter of minutes, etc.
Everyone should have been talking and writing about Tech Unemployment after this, but few did. I think most of the population is clueless and in reactionary mode, while the Owner Class would rather the population not know what's going to happen to them. It was right there on your beloved teevee, people!
Everyone should have been talking and writing about Tech Unemployment after this, but few did. I think most of the population is clueless and in reactionary mode, while the Owner Class would rather the population not know what's going to happen to them. It was right there on your beloved teevee, people!
Here's the 14 minute segment, in case you missed it. That's Brynjolfsson in the pic.
In a blog post after the 60 Minutes piece ran, McAfee complained that other experts had misunderstood what they were saying. Near the end of the post he writes:
Previous waves of automation, like the mechanization of agriculture and the advent of electric power to factories, have not resulted in large-scale unemployment or impoverishment of the average worker. But the historical pattern isn’t giving me a lot of comfort these days, simply because we’ve never before seen automation encroach so broadly and deeply, while also improving so quickly at the same time.
Now: These guys are not my heroes. I've read their stuff. I object to their avoidance of talking about the human questions of suffering under continuing austerity and the defunct neoliberal economic model. In the 60 Minutes piece McAfee is asked about the human fallout, and he acts befuddled, saying only that "science fiction" is his best guide. Maybe he'd get too much crap from colleagues if he brought up Universal Basic Income? If you look at McAfee's blog there's nothing there about what to do about human suffering (that I could see), and in his book with Bryndolfsson they stress more "education" and "entrepreneurship," which I find tin-eared, or just plain stupid. Look at the education system NOW, look at the debt...and where are these new jobs that people would be "educated" to do going to come from? Servicing robots? What a joke. You just spent a dense 90 pages writing about the inexorableness of machines in the workforce. Fer crissakes! Read the Keynes essay from 1930! (Maybe if you rise so far in academia that you teach at M.I.T. [Bryndolfsson], or Harvard Business [McAfee] you aren't required to address ideas of human suffering?)
Interestingly, if you read the comments to McAfee's blog post I linked to above, the UBI is mentioned.
Matthew Yglesias of Slate is pro-UBI, but thinks the idea of permanent technological unemployment is a myth...because in the past when new tech revolutionized production, it created new jobs. Here's McAfee's rebuttal. I find McAfee persuasive here. Do you?
Worse than McAfee, to my eyes, is Bryndolfsson's TED talk . How wonderful! The solution to technological unemployment? Work alongside a robot with advanced Watson-ability solutions! Because...it worked in chess.
This is just pathetic. I applaud these two geeks for pointing out the obvious rapid influx of technological unemployment. They are just silly asses when it comes to what to do about the human fallout, in my opinion.
a still from Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis
Profs Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne
Both of Oxford. On 17 September, 2013 they produced a paper, "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?" They were motivated by a 1933 paper by Keynes, about the possibility that machines will put most people out of work. They also cite Bryndolfsson and McAfee. They say 47% of all jobs in Unistat are at high risk of evaporating under computers/automation/robots/better AI systems...within the next 20 years. Round it out to 16 years and change, just to make it interesting?
Which jobs are susceptible to loss?
-transportation
-data crunchers
-logistics
-production labor
-office support/administrative support
-sales
-service
-construction
-machine operators
-crafts/repairs
Let's not even talk about booksellers, journalists, musicians, travel agents and a bunch more - who still exist! - but...you know what I mean?
Some things that could slow or speed up the loss of these jobs: regulation of technologies as they come online, and access to cheaper labor. In a paper by Frank Levy of M.I.T. and Richard Murnane of Harvard they address the types of jobs that will be lost to robots: "Each of these occupations contained significant amounts of routine work that could be expressed in deductive or inductive rules and so were candidates for computer substitution and/or offshoring."
A.I. has gotten better and better at pattern recognition/machine learning and crunching Big Data, so a lot of clerical and administrative jobs are on the way out.
A.I. has gotten better and better at pattern recognition/machine learning and crunching Big Data, so a lot of clerical and administrative jobs are on the way out.
Computerization will hit a bottleneck or technological plateau, then A.I. will be so good that it will replace most of the jobs in management, science, engineering, and even (this one really gets me) the arts.
Look at the jobs not susceptible to automation. They mostly suck; the post-war boom and middle class labor movement seem a thousand years ago. The jobs that are hard to replace with a robot are low-wage: buildings and grounds maintenance, housecleaning, food preparation (although I've seen robots on video...nevermind), personal services like doing manicures and haircuts, personal care of the elderly (although I've seen videos of robots doing this work...nevermind), or any job involving abstract, unstructured cognitive work that's hard to write code for. And even with these jobs, software like Network Manager is often used.
Frey and Osborne advise more education to do the sorts of jobs robots can't do: "Acquire creative and social skills," they say. Is it me or is this just fucking ridiculous? It's almost worse than Brynjolfsson's "work side by side with the robots!" Just acquire social skills! Just learn to be more creative!
Do these academics ever leave the Ivory Tower and talk to strangers in the streets? Message to Frey and Osborne: you were spurred to write your paper by a 1933 paper by Keynes. Please re-read his 1930 essay on "The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren," and get real: work was, for the most part, something we as a species should try to cure. It's a malady. We have in our sights the cure. It's all about sharing the wealth enough so we can not be burdened with biosurvival anxiety and drudgery. And you'd be surprised how many of us know how to handle leisure. We will still "work" although we may not consider it that. Work may "be" play, but it will be productive. And how many boons have come to humanity when people saw some little problem that needed to be overcome, had the time to tinker, to "screw around" and made a contribution to humankind? Answer: almost all boons...
According to Frey and Osborne, only those occupations that require a high degree of creativity or "social intelligence" or other advanced skills can resist the rise of AI. I saw one paper - my notes are scattered so I can't say where - but two jobs that will last for awhile were (I'm not kidding and if any of you challenge me on this I will find the source to prove it): CEO and poet.
This is where we're headed. And sooner rather than later, friends. It's time to think about what Life is for. Is it to compete in the rat race so you don't have to live under a freeway overpass? Or is money different than wealth?
(this is more than 14 months old, so it's "worse" [or better?] than this):
"Google's Self-Driving Cars: More Than 300,000 Miles Logged and No Accidents Under Computer Control"
