Machines vs. Lawyers

[Esquire]

It's been my experience that most people are basically good-hearted, so I'm hoping that when faced with a new world where nobody's labor is worth paying for we'll just give each other food, housing, etc, since economics ultimately exist to describe a current system of interactions and aren't absolute physical constants....

If nothing else a population of starving, intelligent, physically-fit people aren't going to let the capitalists hoard all the food.

This part is obviously true- the tricky bit is asking, will the economy as we know it continue to function in such a way as to make growth possible? Or will we hit a trap similar to 'stagflation' or the stock bubbles in which market forces cause a frustrating and seemingly illogical outcome that prevents growth?

That's the million-dollar question, isn't it? I haven't done the research I'd need to in order to say something really intelligent on the subject, but I have a strong suspicion that the answer is "no, the economy as we know it isn't going to work in the medium-far future." Whether or not that's a bad thing is also up for debate.

[Guardsman Bass]

In the far future, all bets are ultimately off. My bet is an evolution into some type of hybrid economy where humans/uploads/human-level AIs trade and exchange for services requiring each others' time, on top of a far larger "robot socialism" economy which basically provides the equivalent of a "basic income" in terms of living standards and access to resources (beyond which you have to pay for stuff and earn whatever counts as money, or place a requisition order with the authorities and hope for the best).

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think it would be drastic like "pull the resources and watch everyone die." There is no need when much of the western world's population is already aging, and if it weren't or immigration it would likely already be in decline. Japan might be the best indicator of where automation may lead us down the road. Their population is already in decline without any Dr. Evil plots involved whatsoever. If you wanted to accelerate that trend even further, all you'd have to do is institute a "one child" or "two child" policy.

I may be wrong, but let me point out this:

Letting homeless people freeze to death in the streets constitutes a society deciding to "let useless people die." Arguably, letting people die of preventable/treatable diseases for lack of funds for health coverage, likewise.

So it's not as simple as talking about 'Dr. Evil plots;' there is already a significant fraction of the population that regards a (different) significant fraction as surplus population who can basically wander off and die for all they care.

It's more that automation tends to replace the routine jobs rather than the "low-skilled" ones. Sometimes those are low-skilled, low-paid jobs, but not always - textile industrialization replaced a ton of skilled weavers for example. Automation that gets better in terms of cost and capabilities seems like it would replace the routine tasks of higher-paid jobs sooner down the line, since they cost that much more than lower-paid workers (although if the wage level overall is rising, then eventually your "lower-paid workers" are earning more than what your skilled workers of the past were).

On the other hand, this incentive structure is already in place to a large extent, only with people as the "automation." The reason paralegals exist is that no one in their right mind wants to pay a highly trained and excruciatingly expensive lawyer to do the more mundane parts of the legal profession. Replacing law student precedent-hunters with robot precedent-hunters may not change the high-paid lawyer's job as much as it changes the law students.

The liability issue is a real thing, and I suspect that's what a lot of the "drudgery" work is going to be in the future with further automation. For liability reasons we may end up needing more and more people just to maintain the automated systems and equipment and verify that everything is going according to rules and regulations, along with more work just to manage the increasing complexity of both companies and the greater economy. That came up in a thread a few months back about "bullshit" jobs.

That's very credible. It'd be interesting to see how society adapts to a situation where the average worker is being judged largely on their ability to assess for themselves whether a machine is thinking correctly, and step in when it doesn't. This would almost inevitably require more trust and autonomy than modern managerial culture is happy giving their employees, I'd think.

Short of a permanent depression and economic mismanagement, I don't buy that "20-30% of the population" will never be gainfully employed. In both the growth periods of the late 1990s and several years before the 2008 recession, overall labor force participation was ticking upwards with low unemployment, even though these were also periods of expansion in computer use and rises in productivity. Maybe some day we'll have a true "jobless recovery" that isn't just a case of comparatively weak growth leading to weak job creation, but we haven't had one yet and I'm not about to go with the This Time It's Different argument yet.

As for the downtime in training, most training doesn't take decades of post-secondary education and workplace work. Again, look at the 1990s - we had a whole ton of people who acquired computer skills and capabilities in short order to go along with their increasing use in the workplace.

The main reason I keep pushing this is that I think we're running up against a limit in the quality of basic education. There's a difference between learning a skill (say, typing or 'how to use a word processor') and learning to perform a completely different kind of job.

It's relatively easy to learn new skills, although it still takes new hired employees at many technical jobs six to twelve months to become fully productive for some reason. But it's not so easy to make the leap from being a retail clerk to being a computer programmer, if you started out as a guy who barely scraped through high school and hasn't so much as cracked a book since.

So the question is, all those people of varying ages who don't already have the level of background it takes to retrain into highly skilled fields... what are they going to do? How do we back up and 'retrain' people whose real skill deficiency is that they're just plain not prepared intellectually for complex, non-routine labor?

In the far future, all bets are ultimately off. My bet is an evolution into some type of hybrid economy where humans/uploads/human-level AIs trade and exchange for services requiring each others' time, on top of a far larger "robot socialism" economy which basically provides the equivalent of a "basic income" in terms of living standards and access to resources (beyond which you have to pay for stuff and earn whatever counts as money, or place a requisition order with the authorities and hope for the best).

It's not the far future I'm worried about so much, because there are multiple possible stable equilibriums. The concern is that if we don't successfully navigate the near future, and specifically the transition phase between "95% of people have economically useful skills that cannot be duplicated by a machine and justify paying them a living wage" and "65% of people have such skills."

[Irbis]

A decline in the clout of law schools and lawyers could have potentially broader political effects. For the last half-century, many law professors and lawyers have pressed for more government intervention in the economy. This isn’t surprising. Lawyers in the modern regulatory state reap rewards from big government because their expertise is needed to understand and comply with (or exploit) complicated and ever-changing rules. In contrast, the entrepreneurs and innovators driving our computational revolution benefit more from a stable regulatory regime and limited government. As they replace lawyers in influence, they’re likely to shape a politics more friendly to markets and less so to regulation.

I nearly puked at that bit. So US-centric it's mind boggling. Yes, regulations do absolutely nothing to shield new companies, yes, the law everywhere is mind-boggling mess of 300 years old precedents set by drunk judge (and not, say, simple, short book anyone can look up anytime), yes, big government equals convoluted law, because everyone copies US model of a million amendments to every passed vote suiting lobbyists or acting as pork for the state this particular senator hails from, and yes, progress and innovation is possible only without government

If you can't find employment as a paralegal or a clerk any more than your father could find employment as a factory worker or your grandfather could find work as a farmhand... what's left?

Slums. Or slaving for these who do own everything.

It's fun, and a lot of side irony dish nowadays reading the SF stories from 60s and 70s, the decades of economic wonder. The stories that predicted so much economic growth that consumption and joblessness will become mandatory and the working will become a privilege.

Then, of course, we had oil crisis as first wake up call plus brain worm of Reaganolibertarianism infecting policy thinking with 'screw them, I have mine' while the global economy ship was sailing straight for iceberg and captain was busy selling the lifeboats.

As Bass tried to explain, this is a confusion of 'need' with 'want'. There would be a limited number of things that 'need' to be done if we all settled on some minimal standard of living with no progress, no luxuries, no personalisation and entertainment (if present at all) strictly metered and standardised. However there are an almost unlimited number of things that people (in general) want over and above what they might 'need'

No, you got it wrong. 'Need' as in there is only so much things you can 'want'. Even if you were richest man in the world, and someone given you drugs letting you stay awake 24/7, there is only so much you can consume, so much you can 'want'. The amount of work needed is necessarily finite, and you can (and we eventually will) automate enough of it there simply be no work for people anymore regardless of how much we 'want'.

And that assuming you will get unlimited growth, which is absurd unless space exploration really starts. If the pie is limited, no amount of wanting will produce more resources to work with.

and on a more abstract level society as a whole benefits from more research, more culture etc. Currently automation continues to chew away at the boring routine stuff, but you need something fairly close to general AI to replace humans in creative and interpersonal roles. Of course I'm confident we'll get there too but that's a different argument.

More research, more culture, more creativity are not things general populace can do. Care to tell me where the jobless will get the education, the nutrition, and tools to be creative in brave new world where everything is automated and besides the entrenched elite, everyone lives off social security scraps?

I have formal side education of graphic art designer. Do you have any idea how many things you need to keep in mind simply to produce nice, clean interface and interesting colour scheme on simple, dumb website? That got nothing on people the do really hard design, like architects or professional painters - where you will get skills like that to make anyone interested in what you do? You're a programmer, please, tell me you don't think you can learn first grade programming from books and online tutorials - real skills in that field are expensive to acquire and require quite a bit of talent or aptitude.

Then, there are tools of trade. Cheap, simple design tool like CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X7 costs $499, and that on top of PC capable of running it and a small tablet. And this is literally barebone gear, you don't want to know how much say Photoshop and tablet monitor would add to that. Really simple to acquire for someone automated out of work, eh?

As automation progresses, skills and tools entry bar to grab any job will naturally go up, how you intend to eliminate that issue?

I can't help but notice the vast communities of people who spend countless hours of their own time writing, composing, performing, and building for each other for free, purely for the pleasure of doing it, in real life and on the internet. Do you really think that sort of thing will get less common in a world where the cost of food production is the maintenance of the solar-powered robotic harvesters, or housing is churned out by large 3d printers for raw materials and electricity?

Hello, reality called. Setting aside the fact that 90% of the works of said communities suck (even something so simple as fanfic writing requires you to have time to read literally thousands of books prior to get idea how good writing looks, what had been already done and how you do it), these things are done by people with jobs. Computers, net access, computer and creative skills, everything costs.

Solar powered machines and 3d printers? Heh. Even if they were feasible in any foreseeable future, they won't be free either, and what you said is barely enough for animal-like survival. To get any creativity you need more. Much more. Do you really think suburbs full of jobless, state supported youths in say France or UK are full of creative people, or rather of frustrated, angry mob that has no examples to follow even if they wanted to?

I have been there, and to me, it reads like 'why they don't eat cake then', in 1789.

It's been my experience that most people are basically good-hearted, so I'm hoping that when faced with a new world where nobody's labor is worth paying for we'll just give each other food, housing, etc, since economics ultimately exist to describe a current system of interactions and aren't absolute physical constants. If nothing else a population of starving, intelligent, physically-fit people aren't going to let the capitalists hoard all the food.

The problem is, we're heading for the kind of society where really angry mob with pitchforks can irreparably break economy, and possibly for the kind of society that would use armed force to prevent that.

And the scary bit is, evolution of things can lead to a state where police gunning down protesters with machine guns is the lesser evil.

[Thanas]

Holy Shit, a topic where I fully agree with Irbis on. Culture is rarely produced by those without education and without future. It is usually produced by people who have resources to call upon.

[Guardsman Bass]

No, you got it wrong. 'Need' as in there is only so much things you can 'want'. Even if you were richest man in the world, and someone given you drugs letting you stay awake 24/7, there is only so much you can consume, so much you can 'want'. The amount of work needed is necessarily finite, and you can (and we eventually will) automate enough of it there simply be no work for people anymore regardless of how much we 'want'.

Even if you factor in finite amounts of time to consume, there's still diversification of goods and services, stuff and services you might only want once in a while, etc. This already exists with food businesses, where most people can only consume up to a certain amount of food per day - but that hasn't stopped the creation of a highly diverse, complex food industry. That's what we mean when we say that "wants" are unlimited - you can always think of different spins to put on them.

And that assuming you will get unlimited growth, which is absurd unless space exploration really starts. If the pie is limited, no amount of wanting will produce more resources to work with.

Growth does not necessarily require a minimum amount of finite inputs. It can conceivably happen entirely in goods and services where much fewer inputs are required, especially if you're also increasing efficiency (such as digital services).

As automation progresses, skills and tools entry bar to grab any job will naturally go up, how you intend to eliminate that issue?

The same way we've been doing it for the past 250 years? The average worker in a rich country has far more education on average than prior generations of them, particularly compared to workers 100 years ago or more. And as I said, in a growing economy (like we had in the late 1990s and to a lesser extent in 2003-2007 in the US) the demand for labor pushes people to retrain and companies to often retrain people. Most of these jobs don't require crazy long periods of professional training anyways.

Seriously, what grounds do you have to think that anything's changed from the historical trend? Every new wave of technology and automation brought a whole ton of people out of the woodwork arguing that this was the End of Work (actual book title from 1995), that we'll soon have double-digit-unemployment because there won't be any jobs left, etc, etc. It especially comes out during recessions when unemployment's high and there's no lack of people who want to use the downturns to justify their moral and personal claims about the economy being fundamentally broken or dysfunctional.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, my take on it is that we have not yet, but soon may, hit the limit at which it is not practical to retrain existing workers and properly train new workers fast enough to keep pace with advances in automation.

Prior to about 1950, automation never really pushed unskilled physical labor out of the market: farm jobs disappeared, but ditch-digging jobs didn't. Your skills and capital as a blacksmith might become useless, but someone else with the capital to run a steel mill or foundry would still hire you to work metal in a different way, using skills you could learn quickly on the job.

But as the postwar era moved on, this began to change. Capital and (physical) labor became more interchangeable in agriculture, resource extraction, industry, and domestic services. And capital was usually more cost-effective on a dollar per dollar basis: a bolt-tightening robot arm is more efficient than a man with a wrench, and a washing machine is more efficient than the services of a washerwoman.

So there was a great Volkerwanderung of labor out of physical work and into white-collar service and administrative roles. A robot arm could tighten bolts, but it couldn't wait tables; a washing machine could wash clothes, but it couldn't sell itself door to door. Those were the areas that humans could add value, and there were a seemingly arbitrary number of jobs that could be introduced to add more value.

So far, so good. But the skills required to do these new jobs were still relatively natural and quick to learn. Selling things is a challenging art, but you don't need special tools to do it; waiting tables is a job so easy we routinely entrust it to adolescents. As before, as long as you had a reasonable minimum of intelligence, common sense, and the ability to follow directions, you could hold down a job and work hard enough to earn your living.

Now, we find these jobs increasingly automated or turned into self-serve tasks handled directly by the consumer, because it's again more cost-effective to buy capital than to hire workers. The unskilled white-collar employment sector has begun to shrink, which in itself is not a problem, as there are surely places where work could profitably be done by skilled people.

The question is, how fast will new jobs emerge that do not require complex technical skills? Can the people who now find employment in unskilled areas replace them with jobs in skilled areas? Can they compete with people in skilled white-collar jobs (and therefore more relevant work experience) who are also being displaced by automation?

If you can't find employment as a paralegal or a clerk any more than your father could find employment as a factory worker or your grandfather could find work as a farmhand... what's left?

Slums. Or slaving for these who do own everything.

The former is my concern. The latter, well, personal servant duties are probably easier to automate than a lot of the jobs those people already have. We already have robot vacuum cleaners, and food preparation has been automated or outsourced from the home almost entirely for people who want it that way... how far away is Flexible Frank?

No, you got it wrong. 'Need' as in there is only so much things you can 'want'. Even if you were richest man in the world, and someone given you drugs letting you stay awake 24/7, there is only so much you can consume, so much you can 'want'. The amount of work needed is necessarily finite, and you can (and we eventually will) automate enough of it there simply be no work for people anymore regardless of how much we 'want'.

I think it's likely to happen first is that we simply encounter a situation where it's more economical to buy machines than to hire people for almost all jobs, except in those areas where the jobs are highly skilled and hard to automate.

Regardless of how much is being produced or consumed, it won't matter, because most people won't be able to participate meaningfully in the production-consumption process. And indeed the consumption side of the equation may grind to a halt because no one can consume meaningful, valuable goods, in the current economic paradigm, if they do not produce.

[This is not me saying you disagree with me on this matter, just me explaining my position; others seem not to have quite understood it]

[Welf]

Well, my take on it is that we have not yet, but soon may, hit the limit at which it is not practical to retrain existing workers and properly train new workers fast enough to keep pace with advances in automation.

Prior to about 1950, automation never really pushed unskilled physical labor out of the market: farm jobs disappeared, but ditch-digging jobs didn't. Your skills and capital as a blacksmith might become useless, but someone else with the capital to run a steel mill or foundry would still hire you to work metal in a different way, using skills you could learn quickly on the job.

Actually, prior to 1950 the most important change in manufacturing was that automation pushed out skilled labour. With the introduction of the assembly line complex work was split up in more simple steps. The luddites weren't low skilled "morons" who couldn't find a job, they were high-skilled artisans who feared losing their income.

Now, we find these jobs increasingly automated or turned into self-serve tasks handled directly by the consumer, because it's again more cost-effective to buy capital than to hire workers. The unskilled white-collar employment sector has begun to shrink, which in itself is not a problem, as there are surely places where work could profitably be done by skilled people.

Are they really disappearing? I think you lack the perspective. The US has a much larger service sector than Europe. In Europe a lot more people do things like cooking or washing at home. This goes so far that some economists doubt you can really compare the GDP of the US and EU in their absolute values because service industries artificially inflate the formers numbers.
On a side note: this may be another sign of the growing inequality within the US: rich people today don't have personal servants, they outsource it to restaurants, laundries and so on. This is more efficient and saves them from personal responsibility for their servants.
Either way, as said before it is repetitive tasks that are in danger from automation, not manual tasks. There are still about as many janitors as 50 years ago, and still will be in 50 years from now.
As someone who automates jobs with software I noted that I never have to work less, just have to do some more detailed. About 50 years ago the nonplus ultra of accounting software was sending it to a centralized computing centre and get your taxes calculated. Now we have software that can automatically calculate how much input you need for your assembly line, how long the assembly line will need to produce it, if it is cheaper and/or faster to purchase from outside, and needs the mail for you. And still every month accounting can't get all data on time and has to compromise which errors they investigate and which they ignore. I remember that happy day when my boss suggested we stop looking at unclear stuff if it is less than 400 K. before we cleared everything to 50 K.

The idea that now we are in the end times of full employment is popular for a few reasons:
-we are in a recession; in a recession people tend to succumb to fatality and declare that losing your job is simply fate. It's not, it's just bad politics. The same was claimed in the 30s.
-arrogance of the upper classes; the educated and rich like to think the lower classes are stupid and are destined to be screwed.
-extrapolating current trends ad infinitum in a static world; some jobs disappear and this is extrapolated that soon all jobs disappear.
-recent decline of labour; in the last decades lower paid workers have lost a lot of income. But that is not because of some grand anti-labour technological trend, but because of conservative anti-labour laws and the entry of billions (!) of people into the international competition with the break down of communism and the opening of many markets.

[Irbis]

The former is my concern. The latter, well, personal servant duties are probably easier to automate than a lot of the jobs those people already have. We already have robot vacuum cleaners, and food preparation has been automated or outsourced from the home almost entirely for people who want it that way... how far away is Flexible Frank?

One note here. Even if you could automate the jobs, are you sure the rich would want them to be automated? Having multiple humans as servants is status symbol, after all. I read one school in UK that never had problems finding new students despite very high fees was professional butler training, as their charges in right circles mean more than dozen Ferraris.

And on the flip side, after reading how people in pretty much all countries treat third world workers, I bet screaming at machines and abusing them is much more satisfying than kicking a machine (though this applies more to 'retrained people' from Guardsman Bass post, men above are far too valuable for that and can quit at any time). Then, there are people abused by rich for sex services, that won't be automated any time soon either.

A stable transition is possible. Governments increase how much money they give unemployed people, while reducing the looking for work requirements, until they decide it's simpler to just give everyone a fixed amount every week regardless of their status than make sure they are looking for jobs which don't exist. Enough money for a comfortable, but not luxurious, lifestyle. Which also keeps an incentive for the people who can find work.

And who will pay for that? Rich have disproportionately big say in how everyone is taxed, and they seem to care less and less about sharing now that the spectre of Soviet support for the oppressed is no longer looming.

In democratic countries this is likely as unemployed voters are still voters. So governments will have to take the desires of the unemployed into account more as their numbers grow.

They are voters who the rich try to disenfranchise at any costs (see all Republican attempts shown on this forum). But that is not the main problem. The problem is, they are apathetic voters who often are in too bad shape to care about the voting, apathetic voters who often vote for someone screaming the best promises the loudest, not seeing another choice would be far better for them. Otherwise, say Tea Party would die rather quick and spectacular death. Democracy only works when people make informed choice, not follow propaganda drivel like Fox News or British Murdoch press.

You better pray to God that such a machine future never happens or otherwise there will be catastrophes on unlimited scale as some technocrat asshole will decide that a large number of people are not necessary anymore and thus simply stop wasting resources on them. Of course, I suspect that a large part of people support such a machine future precisely for that very reason.

If you could convince people in 20s-30s that their de facto peers in everything are subhuman vermin, I expect future elite will find putting down uneducated poor masses as easily as knights did peasants or heathens.

The liability issue is a real thing, and I suspect that's what a lot of the "drudgery" work is going to be in the future with further automation. For liability reasons we may end up needing more and more people just to maintain the automated systems and equipment and verify that everything is going according to rules and regulations, along with more work just to manage the increasing complexity of both companies and the greater economy.

I'd expect it to be another case of automation. Dumb worker shows up, looks on pretty lights, finds red one, replaces part it indicates with new part, takes broken part to factory where the only qualified repairman decides if it will be refurbished or scrapped.

Never assume liability can stand in the way of cut corners profits.

Short of a permanent depression and economic mismanagement, I don't buy that "20-30% of the population" will never be gainfully employed. In both the growth periods of the late 1990s and several years before the 2008 recession, overall labor force participation was ticking upwards with low unemployment, even though these were also periods of expansion in computer use and rises in productivity.

Ha ha ha. You're looking with rosy glasses at first world economies. Check this out:



And that is in economy that aspires to first world and only started to gain pace with EU entry. You don't want to know how it was before. 20% unemployed? Heh, and that is before you consider at least 10% are on various rents recent governments handed out to soften post-Soviet transition.

As for the downtime in training, most training doesn't take decades of post-secondary education and workplace work. Again, look at the 1990s - we had a whole ton of people who acquired computer skills and capabilities in short order to go along with their increasing use in the workplace.

You mean ability to do repeated monkey tasks. I often have to help people with computer "problems" and virtually every one of them is caused by trivial things that would be easily solved, but went out of their comfort zone. This is why the Apple is so popular and Linux hated, outside of nerd circles, by the way.

Real computer skills are more like skills of car mechanic, not something everyone can learn.

Even if you factor in finite amounts of time to consume, there's still diversification of goods and services, stuff and services you might only want once in a while, etc. This already exists with food businesses, where most people can only consume up to a certain amount of food per day - but that hasn't stopped the creation of a highly diverse, complex food industry. That's what we mean when we say that "wants" are unlimited - you can always think of different spins to put on them.

But that is also being made more efficient and outsourced. For example, yachts are more luxurious than they were 50 years ago, but I was surprised to find out how many were rented out only when you needed them. Food is more fancy, but truly fancy food is just a side business of big name restaurants that produce it on demand. There is some diversification, but I think on top of consolidation, economies of scale work even for truly rich. So, you can't say they will produce more demand for work, at best demand for workers to learn one more skill.

Growth does not necessarily require a minimum amount of finite inputs. It can conceivably happen entirely in goods and services where much fewer inputs are required, especially if you're also increasing efficiency (such as digital services).

Someone still has to pay for the services, and as they grow more fancy, the entry barrier is being raised, too. It might be easy to teach someone simple haircuts, but what if he or she will be outcompeted by someone who had 5 year training in cutting, modelling, styling, and improving hair?

Plus, one thing I noticed that even if you had no big entry barrier, experts will still do their job faster, better, and in half the time if the job requires more skill. I can use every function COREL offers with good proficiency, but I still watch in awe what some people can conjure out of it, and I have no idea how they do it. Some reduced man trying to learn the program would probably say the same about me, even given the necessary training. Who is going to employ a novice given the choice of better workers with experience? Market can only absorb so many people even in full boom.

The same way we've been doing it for the past 250 years? The average worker in a rich country has far more education on average than prior generations of them, particularly compared to workers 100 years ago or more. And as I said, in a growing economy (like we had in the late 1990s and to a lesser extent in 2003-2007 in the US) the demand for labor pushes people to retrain and companies to often retrain people. Most of these jobs don't require crazy long periods of professional training anyways.

Funny that, because I heard the opposite, that retraining died down and corporations relied on outsourcing and poaching cheaper foreigners. But anyway, I pointed out in my post the cost of just tools of "new worker". Who is going to provide that? We're not in times where a shovel sufficed, now the entry bar is considerably higher. Retrain? Automation and efficiency let one person do a job of dozen - what the other 11 will do? Go flip hamburgers or dig trenches? Oh, wait, that's automated, too.

Seriously, what grounds do you have to think that anything's changed from the historical trend? Every new wave of technology and automation brought a whole ton of people out of the woodwork arguing that this was the End of Work (actual book title from 1995), that we'll soon have double-digit-unemployment because there won't be any jobs left, etc, etc. It especially comes out during recessions when unemployment's high and there's no lack of people who want to use the downturns to justify their moral and personal claims about the economy being fundamentally broken or dysfunctional.

Historical trend?

Ok, let's assume you're right and we are indeed following the historical trend. The historical trend last 1500 years was 3-5% well off elite, big mass of people with barely any education, health care, or perspectives, people being periodically put down when they dared to rebel. If we really follow the historical trend, who you are to say that it is not the last century that was an anomaly and we're not returning to the norm? 12 hour work days? People dying on streets from lack of food and taking any subsistence, backbreaking job to survive?

Also, no, I don't think we're following the historical trend. The reliance on knowledge and machines is larger than it ever was before. If the base of the equation is changed, I really don't think we can extrapolate from the past "but we always managed to somehow produce enough work before" because, duh, it's like claiming II World War and the following Cold War could be modelled by Rome-Carthage relations and wars. Times change.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, my take on it is that we have not yet, but soon may, hit the limit at which it is not practical to retrain existing workers and properly train new workers fast enough to keep pace with advances in automation.

Prior to about 1950, automation never really pushed unskilled physical labor out of the market: farm jobs disappeared, but ditch-digging jobs didn't. Your skills and capital as a blacksmith might become useless, but someone else with the capital to run a steel mill or foundry would still hire you to work metal in a different way, using skills you could learn quickly on the job.

Actually, prior to 1950 the most important change in manufacturing was that automation pushed out skilled labour. With the introduction of the assembly line complex work was split up in more simple steps. The luddites weren't low skilled "morons" who couldn't find a job, they were high-skilled artisans who feared losing their income.

That statement is true but irrelevant to my argument. My choices of (relatively skilled) jobs made obsolete and replaced by less skilled ones were informed by the truth of your statement: farming is more skilled than digging ditches, and being a blacksmith is more skilled than most jobs in a 1900-era steel mill.

Thing is, a skilled worker can always find employment as an unskilled worker in principle. The reverse is not true: it's harder to switch from digging ditches to being a competent blacksmith than vice versa, even if no one wants to become a ditch-digger when they could be a blacksmith instead.

Now, we find these jobs increasingly automated or turned into self-serve tasks handled directly by the consumer, because it's again more cost-effective to buy capital than to hire workers. The unskilled white-collar employment sector has begun to shrink, which in itself is not a problem, as there are surely places where work could profitably be done by skilled people.

Are they really disappearing? I think you lack the perspective. The US has a much larger service sector than Europe. In Europe a lot more people do things like cooking or washing at home. This goes so far that some economists doubt you can really compare the GDP of the US and EU in their absolute values because service industries artificially inflate the formers numbers.

I've reflected on this and on related topics myself- in particular that the service sector in the US may not have grown as much as it looks; what's changed is that unpaid housewives and servants who may or may not be classed as "service industry" have been replaced by, as you say, outsourcing.

Either way, as said before it is repetitive tasks that are in danger from automation, not manual tasks. There are still about as many janitors as 50 years ago, and still will be in 50 years from now.
As someone who automates jobs with software I noted that I never have to work less, just have to do some more detailed. About 50 years ago the nonplus ultra of accounting software was sending it to a centralized computing centre and get your taxes calculated. Now we have software that can automatically calculate how much input you need for your assembly line, how long the assembly line will need to produce it, if it is cheaper and/or faster to purchase from outside, and needs the mail for you. And still every month accounting can't get all data on time and has to compromise which errors they investigate and which they ignore. I remember that happy day when my boss suggested we stop looking at unclear stuff if it is less than 400 K. before we cleared everything to 50 K.

I suppose the thing that's distorting my mind is that I have expectations about what jobs will be automated that may not hold true.

For example, janitorial work is not particularly automatable so far, but it would not surprise me if someone builds a machine within the next twenty years that can mop floors without breaking things, and yet manages to cost... about as much as a car. If it costs as much as a car, it's significantly cheaper than hiring a janitor. In which case the demand for janitors decreases- fewer janitors required per large building, really just enough to be "on call" for whatever emergencies arise that are outside the remit of the robot.

Then again, that may NOT happen.

The idea that now we are in the end times of full employment is popular for a few reasons:
-we are in a recession; in a recession people tend to succumb to fatality and declare that losing your job is simply fate. It's not, it's just bad politics. The same was claimed in the 30s.

Well, I blame a combination of bad politics and fate, but I guess that doesn't make me better.

-arrogance of the upper classes; the educated and rich like to think the lower classes are stupid and are destined to be screwed.

My concern is mainly that we do have a distinct chunk of the population that is not in a good position to go out and snag a master's degree, or even 2-4 years of specialized vocational training, on short notice. Making the nature of employment unstable, so that a given worker can expect to do many different things during their life, favors people who are quick studies... and yet, as a consequence of modern managerial and HR policy, this is precisely what's happened in my own country.

-extrapolating current trends ad infinitum in a static world; some jobs disappear and this is extrapolated that soon all jobs disappear.

I feel that I could equally well argue that saying 'new jobs will appear' is extrapolating a current trend ad infinitum. That was true in the past for reasons, and I'm not sure those reasons hold as strongly in the economy as automation becomes more refined.

-recent decline of labour; in the last decades lower paid workers have lost a lot of income. But that is not because of some grand anti-labour technological trend, but because of conservative anti-labour laws and the entry of billions (!) of people into the international competition with the break down of communism and the opening of many markets.

This is certainly true. On the other hand, part of the change in developed economies seems hard to reverse, because it will never be easy to counter the vastly cheaper labor in developing countries. Unless the whole world becomes developed, which would probably require such a level of productivity as to render us damn near post-scarcity anyhow...

So in the developed nations, it often simply isn't worth paying an American to do a job that can conceivably be done by an Indian living on the other side of the planet. Which is my concern- that the rising standard of living and decreased need for routine, automatable or outsourceable jobs may result in a certain fraction of laborers just plain not being able to sell their labor at price that lets them support themselves.

Firms in other industries go out of business all the time and no one is surprised. When a labor supplier goes out of business, though, it's an unemployment statistic. And while it's usually easier to recover from unemployment than from liquidation of a company's assets, that doesn't mean all prior business models (such as "semi-skilled worker with no more education than the average American high school graduate") will remain valid in a new economy.

One note here. Even if you could automate the jobs, are you sure the rich would want them to be automated? Having multiple humans as servants is status symbol, after all. I read one school in UK that never had problems finding new students despite very high fees was professional butler training, as their charges in right circles mean more than dozen Ferraris.

For the very rich it's a status symbol. For the merely well-off it's an unconscionable expense to have live-in servants.

It's important here to distinguish between the top 0.01% (who can afford butlers that cost as much as sports cars), the top 1% (who really can't but could probably hire SOME servant) and the top 20% (who definitely can't)

And on the flip side, after reading how people in pretty much all countries treat third world workers, I bet screaming at machines and abusing them is much more satisfying than kicking a machine (though this applies more to 'retrained people' from Guardsman Bass post, men above are far too valuable for that and can quit at any time). Then, there are people abused by rich for sex services, that won't be automated any time soon either.

Sooner or later someone, probably someone Japanese, is going to build a sexbot convincing enough to satisfy the average jackass.

[bilateralrope]

And who will pay for that? Rich have disproportionately big say in how everyone is taxed, and they seem to care less and less about sharing now that the spectre of Soviet support for the oppressed is no longer looming.

It's not as simple as saying that all the rich people won't like this method. Sure, some of them won't like it. But how many of those businessmen will run into problems themselves if the unemployed poor can not afford the goods they produces ?

How many other business will have problems if the businesses that buy from them can't afford to do so ?

If there are enough unemployed, there will be rich people who realize that supporting this government stipend will benefit them more than an attitude of 'fuck the poor'.

Democracy only works when people make informed choice, not follow propaganda drivel like Fox News or British Murdoch press.

On the propaganda side of things, if a government does decided to give each citizen a sufficient amount of money each week, is there any justification for that government to keep minimum wage laws ?
Or could removing minimum wage be used as the propaganda to help ease the rest of those laws through ?

Now I'm not saying that I can see the US going down this path. Even if it does, I can't see it being the first country to try it. But if automation leaves so many people unable to find work, I can see at least one country that already offers the unemployed more than the US does going down this route. There might even be countries where the only difference between this idea and what they offer unemployed right now is a looking for work requirement.

Of course, this is all assuming automation becomes good enough to eliminate so many jobs. As assumption I'm not sure about.

[Esquire]

It's been my experience that most people are basically good-hearted, so I'm hoping that when faced with a new world where nobody's labor is worth paying for we'll just give each other food, housing, etc, since economics ultimately exist to describe a current system of interactions and aren't absolute physical constants. If nothing else a population of starving, intelligent, physically-fit people aren't going to let the capitalists hoard all the food.

The problem is, we're heading for the kind of society where really angry mob with pitchforks can irreparably break economy, and possibly for the kind of society that would use armed force to prevent that.

And the scary bit is, evolution of things can lead to a state where police gunning down protesters with machine guns is the lesser evil.

You're going to need to justify that last bit. And explain just how exactly you expect things to get to that point, since if only 3-5% of the population is employable the kind of security apparatus you'd need to keep the other 97% as a permanently starving underclass would be more expensive than just giving them food and housing. Every policeman you draw from that 3% is somebody who isn't a Drone Agriculture Manager, or whatever.

[Zaune]

One note here. Even if you could automate the jobs, are you sure the rich would want them to be automated? Having multiple humans as servants is status symbol, after all. I read one school in UK that never had problems finding new students despite very high fees was professional butler training, as their charges in right circles mean more than dozen Ferraris.

Butlers might well be in high demand, but that's a fairly skilled job with a high level of responsibility. I can't see having maids or a chauffeur being some kind of status symbol in quite the same way, unless one's consciously aiming for the sheer self-indulgent Roaring Twenties nostalgia.

[Irbis]

For the very rich it's a status symbol. For the merely well-off it's an unconscionable expense to have live-in servants.

I beg your pardon? If Polish upper middle class can afford Ukrainian servants, and Russians can afford say Tajik maids, I fail to see how real first world family can't do that. Maybe you're biased by US closed borders? If your country has access to desperate people, you can afford servants.

Hell, a year or two ago a bestseller book was a memoir of Polish girl that spent two years as maid in Germany and description of country from that side.

It's important here to distinguish between the top 0.01% (who can afford butlers that cost as much as sports cars), the top 1% (who really can't but could probably hire SOME servant) and the top 20% (who definitely can't)

If you're willing to look in grey zone and hire someone without papers, someone desperate, you'd be surprised what is affordable. Especially if you're an asshole and you throw some blackmail into deal.

Sooner or later someone, probably someone Japanese, is going to build a sexbot convincing enough to satisfy the average jackass.

Again, would lording above a robot be as satisfying as kicking around a human?

I suppose if you want discretion, or are not tax dodging asshole, sure, but we're not talking about people like that.

It's not as simple as saying that all the rich people won't like this method. Sure, some of them won't like it. But how many of those businessmen will run into problems themselves if the unemployed poor can not afford the goods they produces ?

It's called 'a bailout'. It's better than spending on these parasites that refuse to start a company or eat cake anyway.

How many other business will have problems if the businesses that buy from them can't afford to do so ?

How much lobbying power these businesses have?

I read recently how Germany kills the bits of its own economy that can't lobby the government in the name of "ecology", despite the companies that do get a break being real poisoners. You don't have lobbyist, who cares?

If there are enough unemployed, there will be rich people who realize that supporting this government stipend will benefit them more than an attitude of 'fuck the poor'.

Will there be more of these seeing them as vermin? The urban legend of 'let them eat cake' is so popular and rings true for a reason.

On the propaganda side of things, if a government does decided to give each citizen a sufficient amount of money each week, is there any justification for that government to keep minimum wage laws ?
Or could removing minimum wage be used as the propaganda to help ease the rest of those laws through ?

Someone would need to make a detailed model and count that.

Thing is, would people vote for man proposing above better solution or someone loudly screaming "cut taxes for the rich, you maybe be rich one day too!"? After all, people do vote for this despite taxes for the rich being about the only thing letting others possibly be rich by giving them funding for equal opportunities...

Now I'm not saying that I can see the US going down this path. Even if it does, I can't see it being the first country to try it. But if automation leaves so many people unable to find work, I can see at least one country that already offers the unemployed more than the US does going down this route. There might even be countries where the only difference between this idea and what they offer unemployed right now is a looking for work requirement.

You know, Warsaw Pact countries tried to get rid of unemployment by giving everyone a job, even if that job produced little more than sustenance and occupation for the person. Thing is, even despite that working better than unemployment did before and keeping the population in general more safe and healthy, it was ridiculed all the time in the west as 'inefficient deadweight'. On the basis of comparing western job with eastern one, not job + unemployment sector. If you could have had such ridiculously ignorant (in some cases, at least, from what I saw) critique of something that worked 50 years, I wonder what critique just a theoretical model of living payment will attract.

Butlers might well be in high demand, but that's a fairly skilled job with a high level of responsibility. I can't see having maids or a chauffeur being some kind of status symbol in quite the same way, unless one's consciously aiming for the sheer self-indulgent Roaring Twenties nostalgia.

*shrug* I not sure why these people do it, but apparently maid or a chauffeur is a status symbol. Similar to peacock's tail, I presume.

You're going to need to justify that last bit. And explain just how exactly you expect things to get to that point, since if only 3-5% of the population is employable the kind of security apparatus you'd need to keep the other 97% as a permanently starving underclass would be more expensive than just giving them food and housing. Every policeman you draw from that 3% is somebody who isn't a Drone Agriculture Manager, or whatever.

Imagine everything is automated to the point several nuclear (or fusion) power plants provide power to the entire country. Food for 90% of population is produced in hydroponics plant and cloning facilities, because cheap food outcompeted natural one or we just banned it in the name of animal cruelty. Same for everything else, automated or centralized.

Now, imagine a riot in such setting, similar to French or UK youth riots. These can happen even for a little logical reason. Some perceived injustice, or even just boredom. Mob attacks bureaus of prosperous companies - one of which being energy company providing power to everything, food, clothing, etc. Damaging of servers or even disrupting functioning can cause a crisis of incalculable consequences - you think a state, even modern one, would shy from using force to defend critical facilities?

And that's the thing - with automation and centralization, such critical centres that can paralyse everything around them will be fewer and fewer. Would that stop a mob from destroying it from frustration? I don't think I have high enough trust in fellow humans to say 'yes'. Even today, terrorist attack at some facility can cause huge damage. Tomorrow?

What kind of security apparatus? You'd be surprised what little can keep big population pacified, if you are ruthless enough. Police force could be largely automated (we have capability of making needed machines even now), foreign (good old Roman style) or drawn from the 97%. If you could force Jews to form police helping in holocaust, and manning the operations in death camps, sadly everything is possible.

[bilateralrope]

Irbis, all your complaints about the living payment idea all focus around how it might not be politically viable. All the responses I can give to your points are to point out how it's not clear to me which side of the issue various powerful groups will be on.

My understanding of your position is that you see some unknowns that could go either way for political viability, you just seem a bit more pessimistic about it than I am. I can't say that your pessimism is wrong.

If I do understand your position correctly then I'd say that our positions are close enough that I can't see the point of arguing this any further. Unless you're going to say that the living payment will never be politically viable, or you're willing to ignore the political viability and bring up other ways it can fail.

[Welf]

-arrogance of the upper classes; the educated and rich like to think the lower classes are stupid and are destined to be screwed.

My concern is mainly that we do have a distinct chunk of the population that is not in a good position to go out and snag a master's degree, or even 2-4 years of specialized vocational training, on short notice. Making the nature of employment unstable, so that a given worker can expect to do many different things during their life, favors people who are quick studies... and yet, as a consequence of modern managerial and HR policy, this is precisely what's happened in my own country.

I would argue with two factors: we don't need to retrain on short time, technological changes take some time. Also technology is getting easier to use. Apple made computer acceptable to much more people than most people would have predicted a decade or two ago. Maybe not all people can use technology, but I predict there will be a lot of jobs in making it usable for everyone.

-extrapolating current trends ad infinitum in a static world; some jobs disappear and this is extrapolated that soon all jobs disappear.

I feel that I could equally well argue that saying 'new jobs will appear' is extrapolating a current trend ad infinitum. That was true in the past for reasons, and I'm not sure those reasons hold as strongly in the economy as automation becomes more refined.

Fair enough

---recent decline of labour; in the last decades lower paid workers have lost a lot of income. But that is not because of some grand anti-labour technological trend, but because of conservative anti-labour laws and the entry of billions (!) of people into the international competition with the break down of communism and the opening of many markets.

This is certainly true. On the other hand, part of the change in developed economies seems hard to reverse, because it will never be easy to counter the vastly cheaper labor in developing countries. Unless the whole world becomes developed, which would probably require such a level of productivity as to render us damn near post-scarcity anyhow...

So in the developed nations, it often simply isn't worth paying an American to do a job that can conceivably be done by an Indian living on the other side of the planet. Which is my concern- that the rising standard of living and decreased need for routine, automatable or outsourceable jobs may result in a certain fraction of laborers just plain not being able to sell their labor at price that lets them support themselves.

I wouldn't overestimate the ability of Indian workers to underbid American or western workers. There is a lot more to efficient work than education degrees and time. Cultural norms about work ethic and organization and loyalty matter a lot. Also local laws, the efficiency of laws and authorities too. Many companies wasted a lot of money because reducing wages would not save money.
Also china has made big advances and is about to face shortages of cheap labour itself. The downward spiral of wages may come to an end. But that is just an optimistic view, not something guaranteed.

Now I'm not saying that I can see the US going down this path. Even if it does, I can't see it being the first country to try it. But if automation leaves so many people unable to find work, I can see at least one country that already offers the unemployed more than the US does going down this route. There might even be countries where the only difference between this idea and what they offer unemployed right now is a looking for work requirement.

Of course, this is all assuming automation becomes good enough to eliminate so many jobs. As assumption I'm not sure about.

Actually it's very well possible for business to make huge profits with high unemployment. We have that very situation in the US right now. With high unemployment the balance of power shifts to the employers and they can take bigger share of the profits.

You're going to need to justify that last bit. And explain just how exactly you expect things to get to that point, since if only 3-5% of the population is employable the kind of security apparatus you'd need to keep the other 97% as a permanently starving underclass would be more expensive than just giving them food and housing. Every policeman you draw from that 3% is somebody who isn't a Drone Agriculture Manager, or whatever.

If you don't care for collateral gunning down the population can very easily b automated. Or if you want to be fancy combine a drone with face recognition software. Add some access to Facebook or google to weed out the nonconformists early.
Without the soviet union as external threat to the elite there is no reason to build a greater society to includes everyone.

[Simon_Jester]

It's been my experience that most people are basically good-hearted, so I'm hoping that when faced with a new world where nobody's labor is worth paying for we'll just give each other food, housing, etc, since economics ultimately exist to describe a current system of interactions and aren't absolute physical constants. If nothing else a population of starving, intelligent, physically-fit people aren't going to let the capitalists hoard all the food.

The problem is, we're heading for the kind of society where really angry mob with pitchforks can irreparably break economy, and possibly for the kind of society that would use armed force to prevent that.

And the scary bit is, evolution of things can lead to a state where police gunning down protesters with machine guns is the lesser evil.

You're going to need to justify that last bit. And explain just how exactly you expect things to get to that point, since if only 3-5% of the population is employable the kind of security apparatus you'd need to keep the other 97% as a permanently starving underclass would be more expensive than just giving them food and housing. Every policeman you draw from that 3% is somebody who isn't a Drone Agriculture Manager, or whatever.

Perhaps as much to the point, a "5% producing, 95% not" society is unrealistic. We're more likely to see "50% gainfully employed, 25% scrambling to make a living on the margins of the economy as servants and temps, and 25% effectively unemployable for various reasons."

For the very rich it's a status symbol. For the merely well-off it's an unconscionable expense to have live-in servants.

I beg your pardon? If Polish upper middle class can afford Ukrainian servants, and Russians can afford say Tajik maids, I fail to see how real first world family can't do that. Maybe you're biased by US closed borders? If your country has access to desperate people, you can afford servants.

Hell, a year or two ago a bestseller book was a memoir of Polish girl that spent two years as maid in Germany and description of country from that side.

I don't know what your cutoff for "upper middle class" is. In the US, households in the ninetieth percentile of income make about 144 thousand dollars a year.

I consider the ninetieth percentile about as high as you can go and still really be in the middle class, and at that level it would be hard to support a full time live in domestic servant, or at least hard to keep one for any length of time when better-paying jobs would predictably be around.

It's important here to distinguish between the top 0.01% (who can afford butlers that cost as much as sports cars), the top 1% (who really can't but could probably hire SOME servant) and the top 20% (who definitely can't)

If you're willing to look in grey zone and hire someone without papers, someone desperate, you'd be surprised what is affordable. Especially if you're an asshole and you throw some blackmail into deal.

On the other hand, such cases are not going to be the norm. The percentage of humanity in such arrangements will never be very high in a developed society, I think. A few percent of people may be able to afford illegal-immigrant domestics, but the "gray zone" isn't going to be large enough to support, say, 10% of the native-born population of an entire large country.

If there are enough unemployed, there will be rich people who realize that supporting this government stipend will benefit them more than an attitude of 'fuck the poor'.

Will there be more of these seeing them as vermin? The urban legend of 'let them eat cake' is so popular and rings true for a reason.

The legend sort of alternates between making Marie Antoinette out to be a heartless bitch, and making her out to be insanely disconnected from the day to day reality of the poor. That's the other reason the legend survives; it is consistent with multiple interpretations, so it persists through multiple shifts in time and culture, and across political divides.

We're more likely to see detached rich who don't know and don't particularly care what it's like for the poor, than rich who harbor eliminationist attitudes toward the poor.

Now, imagine a riot in such setting, similar to French or UK youth riots. These can happen even for a little logical reason. Some perceived injustice, or even just boredom. Mob attacks bureaus of prosperous companies - one of which being energy company providing power to everything, food, clothing, etc. Damaging of servers or even disrupting functioning can cause a crisis of incalculable consequences - you think a state, even modern one, would shy from using force to defend critical facilities?

As a rule, key infrastructure in real life is not located in the same place as the conspicuous headquarters that control it. The people who own an oil field do not do business on the site of the oil field. An asteroid could hit Google's headquarters and probably not seriously impair their ability to function as a provider of Internet services.

Likewise for fusion reactors- if they're that big and valuable and new, they're probably located in places far from urban centers anyway, where land is cheap and an accident will cause little harm. In which case rioters will almost certainly never reach them.

Robot farms are even better for that- can anyone seriously imagine a situation where a riot could impair agriculture in any society?