Rise of the Robots and Technological Unemployment

When I was in grammar school and high school I'd often ditch class and go to the library. One of the things I'd learned was good for laffs and the imagination: look at microfilm of old Life magazines, or if the library had bound versions of the entire year for old magazines I'd love to read those. The ads in magazines like Colliers that showed a doctor saying he prefers these cigarettes over all others because of their fine, smooth taste. His stethoscope around his neck, smiling. Wow! How things had changed since...1952!

Always wondrous were ads for gadgets that would eliminate drudgery and free up the woman of the house (it was always a woman) to live a life of leisure. The rhetoric of machines that would eliminate soul-numbing work captured my attention at a very early age because all you had to do was extrapolate...wouldn't it be cool if dad didn't have to go to work and he and mom would be there when I got home from school...doing...whatever it was they wanted to do? What would my world be like when I was an old man of 30?

As I began to study the history of the Industrial Revolution up to present days, I found this rhetoric of labor and machines a constant: at some point in the future - possibly my own future - we would enter another Epoch: robots and computers (same thing) would do all the horrible work, leaving humans to create, socialize, dream. How would the bills get paid? I didn't know, never having paid bills. I figured the money went to others...who worked. But: their work would have gone away too, right?

Everyone would be playing games, painting, writing poetry or learned papers and books, learning new languages or music, or joyously goofing off.

         "Because everything in her house in waterproof, the housewife of 2000..." Wow!

It doesn't look like it's going to happen like They Promised, does it? Why?

Well, the simple answer: instead of the populace understanding that any machine that puts people out of work was invented not only by a genius and his team, but the genius and his team built upon millions of hours of previous work by previous toilers and tinkerers and basic scientific research funded by everyone - all of who were supported by farmers and mothers - we instead allowed the idea that whoever could buy the biggest and fastest machines, owned All Of That.

There seem to be a few hundred choice entry points to tell this story to myself and y'all, but for now I'll cut to December of 2012.

Paul Krugman
In one of his shorter posts for the NYT, Krugman published "Rise of the Robots" on December 8, 2012. He notes that the "college premium" had been stagnant for a few years. In other words, the payoff for getting a degree was not showing its previous earning power in the marketplace. When he first started writing about income inequality twenty years earlier, it was about the gap between laborers and CEOs and other assholes, like hedge fund managers. Now it seems to be between workers and capital...and OMG Marxism! The dreaded Karl Marx, hibernating for a hundred years, suddenly stirs. Production rises, income of labor stays the same and then begins to lose. Why? Automation. Read the article. "If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality." Education won't help when what we really have are a few people who own machines. The biggest and fastest machines. Those with the biggest and fastest machines are reaping all the rewards; everyone else gets the shaft. You buy the biggest machines, you pay 100-1000 of the brightest PhDs to collect data, write algorithms, maintain the data servers...you win! Everyone else is fucked.

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier, computer whiz/prodigy/generalist/genius says he was there (and he was, as numerous books on the history of Silicon Valley attest to) when this really got going and he and his famous friends thought it was going to be this incredible "information is free" thing that would make everyone's lives better. Now he says they were horribly wrong. Because it turns out that the NSA, Wal-Mart, Facebook, Goldman Sachs...all bought the biggest, fastest computers and hired an army of gifted geeks. He has ideas about how to save us, and I think they're good to begin our thinking with.

I've followed Lanier's career for a long time. I think he's one of the best and most interesting thinkers in the world, but rather than talk about his ideas, I'd rather you took the time to watch what he's saying about the existential situation we're in now:

Here's 4 minutes on "Why Facebook isn't free."

Here he is interviewed by Andrew Keen, about Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? It's about 10 minutes and 40 seconds:

Finally, for 27 minutes or so - I think you'll find it well worthwhile - he's interviewed about his books and his changed thinking and what we might do to remedy this "jobless recovery" situation. NB around 5:20 to 6:00, in talking about the structural changes from Kodak to Instagram: "We pretend that the people who do the work don't exist." Another notable moment: from around 8:00 on: "honesty in accounting" could solve the mess the middle class is in. Also a fascinating point: around 11:30: "levies" and their history:

I have a bee in my bonnet and I'm afraid you're going to be hearing more from the OG on income inequality, American fascism, mob mentality, robots/automation/computers, Real Wealth vs. Money, the college loan bubble, Missing Public Discussions, and social fallout of Winner-Take-All Hypercapitalism and Privateeing, and ideas about how we might extricate ourselves from rising misery.

O! The Things I Don't Know! (Thomas Paine and Spinoza)

[A report on watching my memory systems work within the context of books/reading and all that reading we've done and have seemingly forgotten. What remains? All of this within the further context of historical ideas about economic redistribution and welfare, of mounting concern for me, in Unistat 2013. - OG]

I'd just finished a re-reading of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Agrarian Justice (c.1797), when a few lines jumped out at me: didn't someone else say almost the exact same thing at an earlier date? If so, who? One of the unconscious subroutines in my brain spat out an answer 20 minutes later, after I'd forgotten I'd asked the question: it wasn't another of the American fore-fathers. It wasn't Jefferson. (But what does my brain know? Maybe it was Jefferson. Parts of my brain have been known to delude and mislead me in the past. Hell: every day. But let me go find the passage from Paine...)

Ahh...Here 'tis:

When, therefore, a country becomes populous by the additional aids of cultivation, art, and science, there is a necessity of preserving things in that state; because, without it there cannot be sustenance for more, perhaps, than a tenth part of its inhabitants. The thing, therefore, now to be done is to remedy the evils and preserve the benefits that have arisen to society by passing from the natural to that which is called the civilized state. 

Agrarian Justice is Paine writing a proto-Henry George geolibertarianism argument after reading a sermon by one of God's men that He was Infinitely Wise in creating Rich and Poor. This pissed off Paine, who thought humans created advanced societies starting with agriculture, and this in turn created incredible wealth, but also: a squalor unseen in "native" populations, such as the North American native  peoples. "God" has nothing to do with the few rich and the many poor. Paine was outraged by this income inequality and proposed that everyone has an equal inheritance of land as a birthright, but only some have had the fortune to inherit (or sometimes, buy) enough land in which to make a decent living. And so: everyone - even the richest - should receive an annual payment, because we're all in this together. Most of us have been divested of our rightful inheritance of land. Paine says he's got nothing against the landed wealthy, but he is "shocked by extremes of wretchedness," and that "The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." (Recall that Paine wrote this seven or eight years into the French Rev.)

I linked to the actual (very short) text in my first line. See what you make of it.

So, the lines quoted above seem like they could've been written by anyone. They seem like they were in the air among many of the Enlightenment revolutionaries and intellectuals. Was it Voltaire? I went looking through my Voltaire and nothing jumped out at me. He seems to agree, but whatever neurons fired in excitement when I read the Paine passage didn't evince a shock of recognition in Voltaire. I tried Rousseau and found a few pages that read as very proto-Marx, with a tinge of what Paine was getting at, but a bevy of neurological subsystems checked in: "That ain't it, chief." Having nothing better to do, I whiled away more of the better part of an early evening pulling books off shelves, collapsing on the couch, searching, getting diverted, going back on the trail, feeling foolish, cheering myself with Ezra Pound's line, something about true education having taken place "when one has forgotten which book..." But still: I mean, what's really the use of this search?

                                                     Thomas Paine

I guess I wanted to know if Paine had discernibly cribbed those lines from an earlier genius. At times I may be overly obsessed with the idea of origins. I happen to love Paine, seeing him as working class intellectual before the historical notion was formed. And he seized the time and rose to heroic levels.

I also get this similar feeling - "who did he steal this from? - when reading other authors, but rarely has it sent me on this Fool's Errand. Gawd, there was so much You Tube to watch. Films noir DVRed off of Turner Classic Movies. Internet porn. Bills to pay. Calls to return. Articles to write. "Real" reading to be done.

Some serious daydreaming was called for. I've been in similar spots before: have a vague feeling that there was some sort of connection to be documented, but the endeavor was like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar. But those subroutines had come through for me, countless times. And it always felt uncanny. What one must do - it seemed - was to "forget it" and go do something else. I took a long break and listened to Mussorgsky. Nothing.

Okay, okay, not a problem. There have been times when this took two weeks. Or so another set of subroutines seemed to say.

Then, just before I hit the hay, very late, after spending an evening reading unrelated books and topics (Born Losers by Sandage; Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented The Supernatural by Steinmeyer;  and Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons, which is so funny I need only pull it off the shelf before I start laffing, if you must know)...a steering committee drawn up from more modest subroutines suddenly said, "Yo! About that Paine-similar passage problem? We're thinking Spinoza." This was probably 4AM.

Bleary-eyed and slightly buzzed from a monstrously "big" double IPA, I meandered with building excitement back to my shelves. When had I last read Spinoza? I had a copy of his Ethics in my Great Books collection I'd bought from a guy I was renting a room from when I was in my early 20s. I'd grappled and floundered in Spinoza off and on, but mostly I'd read articles on his necessary subterfuges in publishing and eluding authorities in Amsterdam, the "freest" part of Europe, where the local Jews turned on him...jeez I was tired. Some nutjob in the local Dutch jewish community tried to stab Spinoza for being a heretic, or something. Spinoza died from inhaling industrial waste...something like that. OSHA was way in the offing. He'd been up to Huge doings in 'Dam, but had to stay on the QT for persecution's purposes. His family had been chased out of...was it Portugal? by antisemites. They'd been hounded everywhere by goddamned Jew-haters, and the Dutch were the most tolerant around and still Spinoza got shit there. Why couldn't I just scribble "check Spinoza" in my notebook and go to sleep?

I'm embarrassed to answer that question. Let me elude it now, by lamely employing the mountain-climber's gambit: 'Cuz it's there! It's in my personal library. Maybe.

So I start paging through the volume Descartes/Spinoza, vol 31. I feel like an idiot. Did I really ever understand any of this? And what time is it? 4:15 AM? Jeez look: here's a Euclidean diagram and he's trying to prove God's existence or something. Spinoza probably actually "believed" all this, but with hindsight may have been compartmentalizing his ideas in an effort at self-preservation.

Einstein said at one time (to the public) that he believed in Spinoza's God, who revealed Himself in the "harmony of all Being" or some stuff like that. Pantheism. A way to be a mystical Atheist-radical at that time and not be killed by The State. Or to dodge very-real fellow Jews who feel the need to overcompensate to the Dutch, by showing they can take care of their own...

Then other subroutines kicked in, chiming, "Spinoza summarized his entire book at the end for the idiots like you." Oh...right! I quickly flipped to Appendix, which visually reminded me of some of Nietzsche's books. I started skimming like mad. And there, at number XVII, I got the much-sought recognition shock:

Men also are conquered by liberality, especially those who have not the means wherewith to procure what is necessary for the support of life. But to assist every one who is needy far surpasses the strength or profit of a private person, for the wealth of a private person is altogether insufficient to supply such wants. Besides, the power of any one man is too limited for him to be able to unite every one with himself in friendship. The care, therefore, of the poor is incumbent on the whole of society and concerns only the general profit.

That's it! But how could it be? Was Spinoza even read by the Anglo or American Enlightenment thinkers? Was he translated into English then? It turns out he was, and if you Google "Thomas Paine and Spinoza" you see some interesting stuff. Interesting to me, anyway. 'Cuz damn if I don't feel ignorant sometimes. Most of the time.

                                                  Baruch Spinoza

Now here's what's most interesting to me, and you may have noted it yourself: the two passages, when read back-to-back, may seem dissimilar enough that I may seem to be making connections when they're really quite loose, even superficial. Paine addresses cultivation, art, science. Spinoza talks about how a private person who has the dough can't be expected to bring up the poor. But both Paine and Spinoza thought the poor should be cared for by some power of "wholeness" which I think stuck in my brain. Or at least that's my best interpretation, as of today, of the Situation in my nervous system and my ideas about economic justice.

What I think happened was what I'll call my emotional brain had filed the two passages together, somewhere "deep" in there, in my grey-goo. Neural clusters that "knew" about ideas of economic justice as encountered in Paine and Spinoza were close enough that, when my reading of Paine fired one circuit, a message was sent: you have another circuit that is quite related but you consider the two authors as being separate (I think I see Spinoza as a Continental rationalist Jew-genius, much persecuted, but far removed from the American and French Revs. Which I find out, was erroneous), so...you might want to obtain some of that intellectual "integrity" you say you value so much, dude.

Well, I was satisfied. If you've read this far, thanks for the indulgence.

Potshots At Economics: Take Two

Fair warning: I take class warfare as basic and ongoing from the time just before history, as the earliest historians tell of legendary figures involved in striking a blow for the little guy, or of some Draco making everyone's lives miserable-unto-slavery, except for his buddies with all the wealth.

Most of you probably know of these famous passages from early Marx:

"We rarely hear [...] of combinations of masters, though frequently of those workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as their subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate [...] Masters too sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labor even below this rate." Marx soon after notes there is an inequality of access to legislative protection: "Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters."

And isn't it great things have changed so much for the better?

And I hope some of you were not taken in by my pulling a fast one: that wasn't Karl Marx, but the capitalist's own man, Adam Smith. See Book One, chapter 8, "Of the Wages of Labour," from The Wealth of Nations. Marx admired Adam Smith; Smith's writings are pre-capitalist. Smith posits a rationalistic account, based on much empirical observation, of how to improve economics. 


But in my lifetime, it's been more than ten times when some college-educated right-winger has told me, with variations, that Marx is my guy, and Adam Smith his. After reading both, I have major doubts these half-smart and well-fed and well-dressed college boys ever read a word of Smith. He seems to be some sort of Holy Writ among Business Majors: you need only know He was on Our Side.


Adam Smith (1723-1790, one of several brilliant Enlightenment thinkers who were Scottish. Here's the old wig now:

If you haven't read Smith, I highly recommend dipping into him now and again. See if you don't agree with me that he would have nothing to do with the way economics is done in Unistat, especially since 1945. If you want to argue that Smith is your "free market" guy, then go ahead and do so. I'll show you why you're completely full of shit. Anybody wanna debate me on this? Bring it on! Do yourself a favor and cling to your Milton Friedman...(Oh! But why would anyone dippy enough to claim Adam Smith for the current day Republican party be reading this blog? No one reads it as it is...except you. Bless you!)
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"Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money." - Professor George Carlin, Braindroppings, p.193
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Unthinking: money is wealth. No, money is about, as Buckminster Fuller said, "sustainable forward days of survival." Money merely represents possible wealth. It is a ticket for the transfer of wealth. As Robert Anton Wilson said, "If all the money disappeared overnight, the national standard of living would not change (whatever happened to individuals in the interim)." But wealth is anything that is a good: roads, your furniture, air conditioning, food in the cupboard, a bridge to get you over the river safely to where you want to go. Note well that all of these things came from somewhere; someone had to make them from natural resources, or grow them: humans with their accumulated know-how (knowledge which can be represented on paper but can most often qualify as "metaphysical") are the true source of wealth. If you were in a plane crash with Bill Gates, and you found yourself sharing a rapidly leaking life-raft with him in the middle of the ocean, and you had somehow managed to grab a life-vest but Gates had not, and he offered you a billion dollars for your life-vest...how much is his money "worth" then? (Consider this a koan.)


Think of the Arabs before western know-how about geology and means to determine where oil was. The Arabs were "poor." Then, when they learned how to extract the oil from under their land, they (some but not all) became "rich." It was the metaphysical knowledge (which translated into physics) which made all the difference. 


A tremendous 19th century generalist, John Ruskin, coined a third term: illth. Would it serve us to start thinking of "illth" in addition to money and wealth? I think so: illth can be defined as all the changes in our environment that are undesirable or detrimental to humans and the ecosystem: climate change, smog, toxins in the drinking supply, nuclear weapons, a floating barge of man-made trash the size of Texas, etc. 


Note that illth is man-made; it's the downside of converting metaphysical knowledge into wealth. I currently consider active ignorance, stupidity, racism and like prejudices, and the deliberate misuse of language for ideological purposes to be the metaphysical aspects of illth. See Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers, p.149
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"'Wealthy' is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the subtractive measure 'unwealth,' that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes, p.23
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