It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable.
The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing. [o]
What's the proper social response to that, I don't know.
[o] If and when AGI comes along, that will be all of us.
Wait a minute. Higher skill jobs? For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon. If you lost your job because Amazon put your company out of business, you could get a worse, more humiliating job working at an Amazon warehouse, or as an Amazon driver. It was not higher skill jobs the market shifted to, it was Nomadland jobs. Now that Amazon is switching to robots, where are those people Amazon is putting out of work supposed to go?
That's the point.
Not by my reading of the original comment. Seems like they're saying that layoffs result in higher skilled jobs.
And here's my basis for that conclusion:
And what I'm saying is that there may not be new jobs, and if they are they may be lower skill jobs if history is any indication.
The robots replaced the frontline laborers, yes. But someone now needs to maintain, build, and engineer new robots. Hence they said the laborer's job was replaced with one that requires fewer people at a higher skill (and probably pay) level. Or at least that's what I picked out from their comment.
Please note that while the robot is replacing local jobs, the people engineering, building, and maintaining robots could be ln the other side of the plant also. In a world that's seen a huge amount of consolidation we are likely to see further consolidation.
It is not uncommon to move across the United States for work. Across the planet might be a different story.
USA stem grads are too expensive, so companies are just opening body shops in asia/south america.
So stem education was largely just a grift to get everyone they could into college.
Your first statement doesn’t really match your second statement
Get a stem(tm) education! It'll get you a job! Wait.. you cost too much now, so we're not going to hire you, instead we'll outsource.
My understanding was that they're saying it's the act of replacing the worker with a robot that requires more skilled workers to maintain/design/manufacture/etc., not that it merely resulted in a layoff.
The fact that you can now warehouse with robots lowers the barrier of entry for warehousing, which creates new companies that will host competition against Amazon, offer contract labor for Amazon, and in both ways create jobs that are superior to the previously needed entry level pick and packer. The same laborer can now be promoted at a new company to a higher pay job that requires no greater skill set, simply because there are now more of those better jobs at more companies. We can't all be managers at Amazon. But we can all be managers at 100000 different warehouses that previously didn't exist. That's where they are supposed to go.
That seems wrong. Why would robot warehouses lead to more and better warehouse jobs for humans? Fewer humans would be necessary overall in the existing warehouses, and it's not obvious to me why a lot more warehouses would be created.
Did replacing manufacturing jobs with robot assemblers in—for example—the automotive sector, lead to more auto manufacturers and better jobs for auto workers? I don't believe it did. There may be more manufacturers now, and more jobs, but they aren't high skill or highly-paid jobs, and they aren't staffed by the people who were laid off originally (because they were mostly moved to other countries, where people can work more cheaply than the countries where the jobs were lost).
For capital intense upgrades like robots, why wouldn't the advantage go to a few big players, rather than a ton of small ones?
I also don't understand why the number of new skilled workers in this new world would somehow equal the number of warehouses workers laid off. What's the connection between those two seemingly unrelated phenomena? Why wouldn't it, for example, be a lot of laid off low-skill workers, and a just a few new, high-skilled workers?
Or for that matter, why the next generation of robots wouldn't just replace those higher-skilled warehouse jobs in a few years. And so on.
Let me help you with that one.
Fewer jobs & lower pay > fewer orders > fewer warehouses.
Because warehouse workers are the primary customers? I think you're trying to be funny.
It's the biggest cost in the distribution chain.
That means there's room for competition.
You aren't going to trust moving 100 million in product strictly to robots for a long time. And that's just a small business. And there's a lot of them.
Because it's still way way cheaper than labor. Maintenance means you're paying for one guy's medical benefits instead of 20 guys, for example. The labor is the cost that's difficult to overcome and gives the bigger players an advantage. When that's stripped away, it's possible to compete against the bigger guys.
Cheaper than existing labor costs, loans can overcome capital entrance, and you can afford to pay on them when there's a smaller operating cost, plus they have some fixed ROI. Existing need for more warehouses, combined, I don't see why we wouldn't see more warehouses. Of course we will.
Look at middle America. Almost every metropolitan in the country is building warehouses in and around their airports. Some indeed are Amazon's and other big suppliers, but the majority are not. They are small storage and shipping outfits. Don't forget who supplies Amazon!
Also, the push for more condensed housing means fewer people per household which means more duplicate junk per person as they won't share with another household, obviously.
Growth means warehousing. There's no way around it. Unless we will manufacture domestically, that demand isn't going anywhere.
That's assuming the warehousing robots are commodities, which they aren't and maybe they'll be in a few decades.
It also assumes the moat to warehousing isn't huge, which seems kind of silly for such huge capital investments.
The moat is definitely smaller when labor, your biggest cost, is smaller. You can finance a purchase that's much larger if you are able to make the monthly payment because you don't have high labor costs. Purchasing has an ROI, and labor doesn't.
What am I missing?
The fact that warehouses are huge and need a lot of supporting infrastructure?
It wasn't so much the jobs that shifted there as the customers, and the reason for that is that Amazon had better prices. Then people complained about the jobs they did offer because they're mechanistic and exhausting, so they automate them and then people complain about that. But that too should result in lower prices -- Amazon's retail operation doesn't make any money, it's all going to competition with Walmart, who is doing the same things to lower costs.
But lowering prices creates jobs. People pay less for a dress or a phone case and then spend the money on something else. New jobs are created doing the something else.
Where this becomes a problem is for the things where the prices don't come down, like real estate. You have extra money and now you want to buy a house, but zoning laws inhibit new housing from being built, so instead if people have any money the monthly payment you need goes up or the landlord increases your rent. Or you have to buy something from some monopolist who can raise prices to eat your disposable income. Then the money goes into some corporate holding company that just keeps growing their hoard and never spends it on products and services.
The problem isn't robots, it's certificate of need laws and high tuition.
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.
I gotcha!
Isn't this the principle supposedly behind trickle down economics just by another name?
The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from learning to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_Unit...
That said, I would also agree with the conclusion that "a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing", but for different reasons.
I expect the abilities of AI to expand over time.
IQ is a poor measure, but suitable as a shorthand especially for a comment like this.
Imagine a general purpose AI that runs as fast as a human on 100 watt hardware; first one will be an idiot. Let's say IQ 50: only 0.1% of humans are dumber than this, nobody was employing them anyway. Version 2, say IQ 85: now about 16% are beaten by the AI, this absolutely matters, they're unemployable forever through no fault of their own, give them a basic income of some kind. Version 3, IQ 100, now half the world can't get work. Version 4, IQ 115, now it's 84% who can't get work, etc.
Reality is a lot messier than that, so nobody needs to bother picking holes in the specific details such as "that's a lot of electricity" or "AI isn't a robot" or "comparative advantage": this is a comment, not a research paper.
The assumption here is that an AI with IQ 100 could do anything a human with an IQ of 100 could do, only cheaper. But that's just averages. Really it would do half the things better and half worse, and then people have jobs doing the things that it does worse.
That would continue until it doesn't do anything worse, which may or may not ever happen, but if it did and we're all still alive then the result would be post-scarcity and nobody would need a job.
The power structures will never allow it. The conditions for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for some time now. We will simply end up with a a planetary ruling class that lives opulently while the other 99% live in abject poverty.
That's an impossible scenario in a democracy which is ruled by majority. Wealthy class have hugely outsized influence, sure, but it's not limitless.
Consider, for example, that every politician lives and dies by his constituents employment metrics.
If population is genuinely unhappy with arrangement they DO vote for change. If they are extremely unhappy - they vote for drastic change.
I think your view of our democratic institutions is a bit too rosy. I'm pessimistic that they'd withstand the social upheaval that might occur with a smart-enough AGI. Even now it seems like many people prefer authoritarian rulers -- or at least they think they'd prefer that, as long as the ruler is a part of their political tribe. They'll be in for a painful surprise later, of course.
And that’s not even factoring in the automation of highly targeted yet dynamic political content (not just ads but the consumed content itself) in order to charge/persuade the target to vote for the paying party
Not if everyone wants to maintain their current standard of living. Imagine working 50% less hours, but also having to live off 50% of your current total compensation. Some here could probably manage that, but most would probably prefer not to.
Now if you want a whole "society of leisure", you'd have to impose that same lifestyle choice across all of society by government fiat. Its easy to see why that hasn't happened.
Not really a realistic view of the western economy. Or economics.
Things like 'compensation' are fluid, fairly arbitrary and largely unrelated to the industrial complex. It's whatever we decide it is, pretty much.
Automation is in full swing, has been for twenty years and is only accelerating. Ignore that at your peril. Everybody will continue to have toasters, computers, cars even when we've automated most of us out of an industrial/manufacturing job.
How do I know? Because that already happened. Instead of tens of thousands of people on assembly lines, we have tens of engineers and managers overseeing automation. If it hasn't happened in some cherry-picked example, it will very soon.
We have to plan something for the majority of us to do, some way to participate in the resulting economy, without just throwing up our hands and saying "It's too hard!"
So much to say on this subject, that doesn't fit in an HN text field. There's a long history of thought on this subject, and the comments here indicate most folks are still on the first page in their thinking.
Perhaps you could link to some information on this "long history of thought on this subject" because to me everything you just wrote sounds like nonsense.
The idea that we can just double people's compensation and thereby double our total economic output (because compensation is "whatever we decide it is") is so wrong headed I don't even know where to begin. Maybe that's a misunderstanding of your position, but I don't know how else to interpret what you just said.
"The power structures" want people to need to work so they have to work for them. Better to keep you occupied with the rat race than have you spending time advocating for political reform.
Which is why work expands to fill all available time. They want you to have a job, because what they don't want is what you might do if your time was your own. For some subset of "they" that represents the most malicious pricks.
The thing that happens if they win is that everybody still has a job even if they're not doing anything useful. Which in a lot of ways is what's happening already.
On the one hand I like to have faith in humanity. OTOH...
Anytime someone in power has no need for someone - what have they done? Provided for them for the rest of their life? Or discarded them?
The results generally lie with emotional attachment or sentiment. Take care of your aging parents as they become productively useless - sure.
Take care of the abstract thousands of people who made [thing] but are out of work now? Somebody else's problem.
The point is that they don't end up out of work.
We have more automation right now than at pretty much any other point in history, and the unemployment rate is not high.
The point is that the unemployed end up using violence.
So you need to create employment to keep them out of trouble.
IQ is sort of useful to measure humans because we have roughly comparable skills. It’s not applicable to AI at all in terms of measuring job fitness.
If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need an IQ of 85 but that doesn’t mean AI is doing it any time soon.
The article and discussion are literally about machines moving stuff.
In a warehouse, not up the stairs to somebody's apartment...
Why not, though? Advancements in robotics happen all the time. If we end up with a decent AGI in 50 years, I expect the state of robotics to have advanced too, perhaps to the point where it could carry furniture up a stairway to an apartment.
a/ My bet is that some large fraction of people are currently doing jobs that are far less demanding ("robotic") than what they are capable of doing.
b/ Also, in my experience IQ has a far bigger impact on length of training time than it does on the on-the-job performance afterwards.
Agreed, hence the caveat of 100 watts when at human speed: Humans are not capable of competing against costs of 100W * $0.10/kWh = $0.01/hour even when the only expense that human has is the cheapest available calories.
Agreed. I also forgot:
c/ as far as I can tell, "jobs" have been steadily becoming less skilled over the centuries (because we expect people to switch more frequently between them?); can we accelerate that?
So might a way out be that people do regular 100 IQ people stuff (yoga instructors, community theatre, etc.) and automation does (almost) all the heavy lifting?
Bring on the Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy? If the Morlocks of the future are electronic, they won't want to eat us Eloi anyway? (burning a human for electricity is even more wasteful than giving it spin classes)
You are saying "IQ" and "intelligence" to explain people's career prospects, but what you actually mean is "social class".
No, what they mean is IQ/intelligence, just as they stated. Social class is part of the story, more so in the past than it is now, but it's not the entire story. High intelligence is a way out of upbringing and circumstances at the margins, when you can capture opportunities to escape. Tech jobs are filled with people who didn't come from higher social classes, many who suffered inequities during their childhood even from their social peers, but persevered due to having drive and intelligence.
Their argument is exactly what they stated, no hidden meaning here about social class. Not everything is class warfare.
It's time we take on bigger and harder problems to solve. Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that. We need multiple such companies tackling bigger problems. Solving climate change, dealing with plastic are other bigger problems.
I beleive there's no shortage of jobs. What if we start cleaning earth or reverse effects of human civilization on earth to make it more sustainable. The amount of people needed for that job are huge but we can't pay them at all because how our economies are structured. We need tectonic shift in how the world works today. Machines are taking human jobs, good. Now humans are free to do the work which machines can't do.
There's an organization called NASA working on it.
Does NASA have any planetary colonization program?
They do plan the Artemis mission, but AFAIK that is about establishing a tiny scientific base on the Moon, probably with regular exchange of the crew. I don't think they proclaimed an ambition to settle massive amounts of people there.
For me "living on another planet" is only really SpaceX's goal. Build a semi-independent nation on Mars, with a million or more people necessary.
That is very different from a scientific base project.
Proclaiming things is very easy.
SpaceX aren't just proclaiming things. They are building a skyscraper-sized fully reusable rocket with completely new engines to get away from the Earth cheaply.
The first crewed mission to Mars is very likely going to be a join SpaceX-NASA mission... to set up a crewed research station. Basically the same thing as Artemis Base Camp, except further away.
Yes, SpaceX wants to ship millions of people to Mars, but realistically they are several decades away from even starting that. You want to get a small permanent settlement on Mars (like a crewed research station), and get some experience with operating it, before you start sending heaps of people. And probably the initial focus will be just on growing that crewed research station (from 20 people to 200 people to 2000 people). And only then will you have enough information to really plan making it significantly bigger. I doubt we'll get there until some time in the second half of this century.
In the medium term, I think the Moon is a more realistic target for the private sector. The total cost per a person-year of a crewed lunar base is a lot less than a crewed Martian base, so you can pay for a much bigger lunar settlement for the same budget. You can also sell lunar surface tourism to the ultra-rich, and hope that economies of scale will gradually drive the price down; your average billionaire can spare a couple of weeks for a trip to the Moon, not the almost 3 years a Mars round trip would take. How about Hollywood filming on-location on the Moon? Reality TV shows? Professional sports competitions? All a lot more feasible given the much lower travel time (about 3 days) and light distance (a bit over 1 light second). I doubt any of these would be massive revenue sources (at least at first), but they'll be economically feasible long before their Martian equivalents become so.
I don't think anyone can say what will 'very likely' happen, but NASA often hires many contractors and also does much work internally (e.g., at JPL) for a major project. Also, there may be other national space programs partnering in the mission.
...and they are building it for NASA's Artemis program. SpaceX evaporates the moment the juicy billion dollar public contracts dry up.
Mars is still a pipe dream. You might as well give the credit to Edgar Rice Burroughs for as far as realizing it has come.
"SpaceX evaporates the moment the juicy billion dollar public contracts dry up."
So, not in the foreseeable future, given the new Space Race with China.
Ofc the government is an important customer for any launch provider (not just SpaceX), given that a lot of current space activity is military in nature. That just comes with the territory.
Edgar Rice Borroughs died before the first man-made rocket reached the orbit. Writing about Mars isn't the same as building a ship that can reach it.
I am not a native speaker of English, so I am not sure how much deprecation does the term "pipe dream" contain. But I don't think that manned flight to Mars is wild and unattainable fantasy. I would say that it is on the same level as manned flight to the orbit by 1945 - not yet here, but technically and economically feasible in a decade or two.
There’s a lot of unknowns in that and ROI can take very very long time. Not many people can or are willing to take that risk. If that one company is successful then you’ll see that space flooded with new companies.
Our generation is highly advanced but we have become very short sighted. We have made a mess of our world because of it.
I remember a story about Oxford. When it was built they planted entire forest of Oak trees so that in 500 years when Oxford will need repairing they have ample amount of wood available. In that age people were capable of thinking 500 years ahead. And we with all our advancement can't even think beyond ROI. Living on other planet should not be seen as choice but something that is necessary.
The problem is resources and money are not unlimited.
And that's why 1% of us must hold on to 50% of that money and resources.
All of that money is working as part of the economy, paying salaries and such. It's not at all obvious that it's less efficient in an economic sense (although obvious not ideal from social sense)
Jobs are a byproduct of capital owners needing labor to sell things and services with a profit margin, so they can buy the good stuff. I’d argue that once the capital owners possess the technology that brings the cost of labor near zero, they will have no need for an economy at all, not to mention other people - unless it’s something more akin to a zoo.
Most Americans are capital owners. You’re describing a world in which most Americans live in a utopia.
A quick google says that 53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that means that 47% do not. There will be some fraction of that 47% who have their own businesses, but I’m guessing that these would be people at the bottom end of the business scale. Would it really be fair to call the guys driving a truck through the alleys collecting crap metal capital owners who would live in a utopia?
The same article that cites the 53% number also says that the top 10% of income earners own 70% of the stock market. That doesn’t really sound like a recipe for utopia.
Does that include 401(k)s and pensions?
Very probably, yes. I'd be shocked if more than 60% of Americans even have a 401k/pension, let alone one with any meaningful sum invested.
Yes. 401(k)s but not pensions. The latter are defined benefit programs where participants are not responsible for making investment decisions.
https://youtu.be/FID0BLkZXuY?t=2058s
I thought Amazon was a public company, not private, and since supply and demand is dead and real price discovery is gone, that unless it becomes a private company it likely will not survive, unless there are enough retail investors to DRS directly register shares in their name so that DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) and Cede & Co do not hold all the assets for retail in street name to then bankrupt and collect all the assets leaving retail investors holding worthless securities, but I don't see that Amazon is private? Maybe I missed something that happened and it's a private company now?
Parks, libraries and military bases are publicly owned. Amazon is a private company whose shares are publicly traded.
This is wrong.
This is nonsense. (For starters, not how bankruptcy works.)
Mankiw’s Principles of Economics is a well-regarded introductory text [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Man...
And for most Americans who own publicly traded stock, the income that is derived from it is supplemental, not primary.
You're not really a full-on capitalist unless you can stop working and still have sufficient income derived from economic rent collected from somebody else who is working to sustain you in perpetuity.
Who is going to buy all of their crap then?
They won’t be selling anything by that point.
I noticed NVIDIA skyrocket from billions to trillions market cap, so wouldn't NVIDIA be able to help deploy some a.i. simulatedly autonomous homo borg genesis to engage in scripted automated consumer lives to replace traditional homosapiens/humans consumers and takeover what otherwise was economy and market for human people but now they are replaced by redefining human and people to be displaced by the automated scripted a.i. controlled ones? This is already happening, right? Or did I just give them idea to make this a reality? lol, wait, why am I getting raided by the FBI right now? What's going on? HALP!
This reminds me of the Chinese white monkey jobs.
Neither computers nor cars, nor office nor photoshop decreased the amount of available jobs...
But exactly as the person you replied to said, they increased the average intelligence needed to do the new jobs. That leaves so many marginal people unemployable. They could have maintained horses but working in cars is harder. I like this observation.
I'm not convinced that animal husbandry is less skilled than working in cars. Different skill, and as I've never done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've never seen before. Production line work I did do as a summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line not cars.
The specialization has certainly taken off - people are much more specialized in their jobs now whereas “farmer” was really a jack-of-all-trades with passing capabilities in many different skill sets.
Yes and it’s not at all obvious to me that being a jack-of-all-trades farmer (builder, mechanic, etc) requires less intelligence than learning Python.
There is a thing to say about "unnatural-ness". Handling horses up to a point had to be more intuitive and more approachable, we've been around horses and other mammals since forever. Around spreadsheets? 40 years, max.
They actually resulted in a decrease in overall skills required. It takes a lot of skill to use a loom and make a napkin, the same is not needed for factory work yet you can make 100 napkins at the same time.
Similarly, we had the rise of the service industry in the US - manufacturing required a lot of skilled labor; retail and wait-staff do not require the same skill.
As a software developer, I've personally eliminated many jobs. Software was eliminated entire classes of jobs. Almost all investment in technology by businesses is about cost reduction and the number one cost is labour.
I think we're past the point where technology is making new jobs -- all that low hanging fruit has been gone for decades now. Growth now is all about optimization.
That's undeniably true, but not the point: obviously new technology eliminates entire classes of jobs (not much call for telephone switchboard operators these days), but ultimately if more jobs are created than are lost, we're fine.
I personally do wonder, though, if many of the new jobs that are created are worse jobs. For example, I have not yet taken any work in the "gig economy", but most of it seems pretty miserable, with shit wages.
For people who believe more jobs are created, it seems like they rely in chaos theory or something. They can't see how or where these new jobs will be created or how automation leads to it. We automated physical labour so we increased intellectual labour. Now are automating intellectual labour too so what's being increased now?
You do realize that most governments run massive jobs programs to ensure this number of available jobs stays high, right? In the US we give massive tax breaks in exchange for hiring numbers.
Computers may have very well reduced job numbers but we're running a contrived system at this point.
Source?
It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time.
In addition, the nations driving the most technological growth domestically have experienced the greatest job growth over that time. With the result that many of them, like the U.S. and UK, have had to develop robust immigration programs.
Even within a single nation, like China, there is temporal correlation between technological development and job creation. As China has leaned into tech over the past few decades, job creation accelerated there.
Again, the evidence shows the opposite correlation: technological development results in more people working, not less.
The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow. Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is capable of replacing a human in let's say software development. What new jobs would it create?
All technological advancement so far has created new jobs because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip factory or doing devops. As far as I can see an AI is general enough that you don't need much effort to specialize it and with how things are currently going, only a few players have the capability of building and deploying it.
Poor countries have with little physical or financial infrastructure have high unemployment. You'd think there would be more jobs because there is a lot more opportunity to grow, but no, it's the opposite, there few jobs and they are bad jobs. Because there is little opportunity to create actual VALUE, in economic sense.
Technology brings efficiency and brings jobs. Say entire tech sector, software developers and IT get fully automated - well, now all the VALUABLE services those companies provide are much much cheaper. All the savings are passed on to their customers (B2b and B2c) who will now spend those savings doing things they couldn't afford to before - and THOSE industries are where jobs will move to.
For a more simplistic example, imagine cost of electricity (or some raw materials) dropped 10x, would it lead to fewer jobs or more jobs? Of course more jobs, since you'll be able to do a lot more now.
While I understand your point it seems to only focus on one side of things, a bit like trickle down economy.
Let's say the IT sector is completely automated. What would all those devs do? Now keep automating medicine, legal and everything else and ask what would those people do? What's remaining are probably manual labor jobs for which we don't need so many people.
I'm sorry, why would an AGI be interested in programming? My kids are AGI, and they're not interested. I think there's a real moral conundrum when we say "programmer AGI" because, I think, we're implicitly talking about terminating every non-programmer AGI, to meet our labor force whims. Replace "programmer" with intellectual task of your choice.
Your kids are artificial general intelligence?
That isn't some immutable law of the universe. 200 years is a short sample size relative to geologic time.
Once we have robots doing the cooking, cleaning, heavy work, etc., what becomes of the Waffle House and Walmart worker? There will be a lower bound capability threshold, and automation will eventually exceed that.
I think a smart comparison would be to look at what job opportunities are available to the intellectually disadvantaged.
Then what happens when that lower bound inches higher?
Ya, when people use this argument ask them "the population of humans always grows right?" Because up till recently that was the consensus unless something drastic or terrible happened. Then in the past few decades we see people having far fewer children then even replacement rate.
Upsetting the labor market is leading us into unpredictable territory, much like at the start of the 1900s and the automobile set off a string of events that lead to two massive world wide wars.
In principle, they could probably just buy their own robots and start their own businesses. Locality is its own quality for SMEs. Whether or not that happens in practice is anyone's guess.
200 years ago the town [severely mentally disabled person] could chop wood and carry water. What's he doing today?
There are ~9 million people on SSDI (disability) and ~5 million on SSI (considered completely unfit for work, the US version of basic income), and ~50 million retired. Retirement conceptually slowly became a thing around the late late 1800s. Many of these people are in one of these three categories because there is no job that would be a good fit for them, especially SSI, which most Americans don't even know about.
Technology can also reduce the skills needed for jobs. For example, you no longer need to have an entire city's streets memorized to be a taxi driver.
I don’t think there was ever a taxi driver shortage because city streets are too difficult to memorize.
Rideshare and delivery apps have enabled more people to do those jobs than before.
Because of less skills required? What are you basing this on?
More like because of the non-necessity of supplying a livable wage.
Prior to the advent of GPS, taxi drivers in many cities were tested on their orientation skills and had to memorize a lot of streets. I would be surprised if no one ever failed this part of the exam.
Until you get replaced by a robot taxi.
You might look up what economics has to say; this issue is well-addressed there. Some fundamentals:
The comment above assumes a static marketplace - the same technology, needs, etc. - and one that addresses the entirety of economic demand, rather than a dynamic market where those things change and resources are scarce (thus when resources become available, they are applied to other unfilled needs).
For example, which skills are in demand changes but there is still growing demand: If you look at the jobs performed 100 years ago, you'll see that most of them are no long needed. Yet not only are most people employed today, we have ~3-4x as many people - most of the jobs disappeared, yet, 3-4x people have jobs.
And yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but that's good because that work comes with higher pay.
The problem, of course, is that wages stagnated from '99 to 2014 and the job participation rate has been decreasing since 2000 while cost of living and general production increased; so no, in a dynamic market work does not necessarily come with higher pay. It actually wouldn't really make sense for all new work to come with higher pay; if you have changes in supply (which is what we are really talking about) that come with associated lower labor costs, the people that used to provide higher cost labor for the initial supply level will have to accept significantly reduced salaries in their industry.
That's what happened with the industrial revolution. Wages overall increased because people entered the workforce for the first time as skill requirements went down, but the average wage of previously employed people went way down as artisan and highly skilled labor was outcompeted by factory work.
wages stagnated, not total compensation which continued to grow employee preferred form of compensation has just shifted towards other benefits
while cost of living and general production increased
This is a major problem! Why ? Corporations chasing profits without enough competition ?
Eugenics
Sure, who's volunteering to be the first one? For sure I won't volunteer for it :-)
If it comes through rna/dna editing it will be a good evolution
How do you intend to be any more successful than the last several thousand years of attempts at eugenics?
But how do you know what that future looks like? For example, What if we use AGI and make ourselves smarter and more capable as Kurzweil has argued ?
You can’t imagine what that will look like so why worry about jobs ?
I'd rather worry about what that would look like given the current trends in tech and society.
I mean a large portion of people on the 'information highway' seem to use it to make themselves dumber.
No they don't. If AI reached the point where it was capable and willing to do all white collar work, there'd be no more need for humans to do that kind of intellectual work. What would still be needed is service jobs that rely on the "human touch", and trades that AI lacked the dexterity to do. We're already seeing that now, with AI posing a greater threat to programmers' jobs than to plumbers or electricians' jobs.
Oh good, now instead of creating things, everyone can have a fulfilling career at Starbucks.
That was true in the past, but as technology gets better that won't be the case. Yes new jobs will be created, but there'll be fewer and fewer.
Technology will allow for more generalized approaches that can be quickly adapted to new solutions. So new jobs will also be replaced quicker and quicker.
Comparative advantage will keep people employed for a while: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-...
There's a recent NBER paper that predicts wages will increase in the beginning of the AI revolution, even as AI displaces some jobs. Eventually there will be mass unemployment, but only when AI dominates humans (cost & capability) at almost everything.
the job displacement could be in the care sector. that is what usually happened.
I don't think being a caregiver necessarily is a more complex job than the ones being displaced.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
A taxi driver of 20 years ago had to memorize roads and routes, and become familiar with traffic patterns at different times of the day. (Many taxi drivers sucked for various reasons, but that's neither here nor there.) Today, anyone can be an adequate taxi driver, without really any knowledge of the areas they work in. Slap a smartphone on your dashboard and you're good to go. That's a lower skill job.
Sure, and that's part of the problem. You lay off those 100 manual workers and hire 5 workers to maintain the machinery. It's not at all clear that those 100 manual workers are going to then find higher-skill jobs, especially if they need training to get them.
Easy: universal basic income, plus free higher education and vocational training programs for people who do want to work in a field that still needs humans in the loop. We need to drop this inhumane view that people who can't (or even simply don't want to) work somehow don't at least deserve a basic standard of living. And I think we'll find that if we remove financial, housing, and food insecurity, more people will actually want to find meaningful ways to participate in society. Some people won't, and maybe that's a shame, but for the sake of all of us, they should still be housed and fed, comfortably enough.
When intelligence becomes truly abundant and cheap, then human intelligence won't be valued by the market. You only get paid well because your intelligence is scarce, but that won't be the case in a future with ASI.
It's hard to predict what will be valued, maybe personality traits that lend themselves to jobs like social media influencer, politician or actor, because people may still value real humans in these jobs.
Just like the Turing test turned out to be the wrong problem, AGI is the wrong goal. As long as AI can stoichastic parrot its way to success, who cares if it's AGI? My washing machine broke and I want my robot to fix it. it doesn't need AGI to diagnose and fix the problem, it just needs to have seen that in the training data.
The real shift comes when the robots are dexterous enough to fix each other. that's when no new jobs will be created to fix them because they can do it themselves.
Universal basic income of some kind.
I don’t agree with this take. A more accurate and precise way to describe the effects of automation is that it creates more human-centered jobs, some of which may require higher IQ but many that do not. Your average massage therapist does not have a higher IQ than your average Amazon line factory worker, for instance.