We are facing a brand-new set of oncoming challenges. There’s never been a situation previously where a significant (and likely unlimited and continuously, and rapidly, growing) wave of higher-qualified workers who did not require wages entered the workforce.
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I discuss LDNLS vs. AI over in this other post. These things are affecting the job market now. There’s no remaining time to feel or act complacent. |
Increasingly sophisticated LDNLS Workers that never cheat, never steal, are never late, very rarely “sick”, have no unions, no wages, no insurance, no internecine or even trivial conflict, don’t get pregnant, who never have to stay home with sick kids or spouse, don’t need or want a cafeteria, a gym, breaks, a lunch hour, tips, or stock options; are unfailingly polite, even sympathetic, immune to office romance, gossip, corporate espionage, complaints of mistreatment; have no interest in and do not require promotion, will never misuse company time, and are replaceable the very moment something more effective is available without any consequences to social security charges, unemployment tithing, legal costs, or need for security personnel to walk the previous “employee” to the door.
Whatever ideas anyone has of re-employment absorbing workers displaced by this new wave of automation must factor in all of the above, and more.
There will be some re-absorption (or at least, re-positioning) initially into newly created service jobs that arise to keep the new work force running; but it won’t be long before those jobs are automated away as well. Any job that deals with information, with diagnosis and testing… these will fall earlier rather than later.
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Consider a fast-food job where the restaurant is open 6AM to 11PM, 7 days a week, a fairly typical operating span for a McDonald’s or a Burger King. An employee role there requires payment of $10/hour, to various employees on various shifts, for 17 hours a day, all year round. Leaving aside government tithes such as overtime, social security and unemployment insurance, this job represents a base continuing cost to the business of $10 x 17 x 365, which is about $62,000.00 a year. When the cost of automating that position drops under $62,000.00 a year, the employee will be replaced. There’s no “if” about this. If such replacement is not made, more agile competition that does do so will destroy the business that has failed to do the obvious thing. This is coming, and it’s coming soon. Lawyers and paralegals are already being replaced. Receptionists. Drivers will be soon. And it isn’t going to stop there. |
Here’s how it’ll go: as soon as the cost of putting automation in place drops below the cost of keeping a human in place, the human will lose the job. The only way to slow this down is to artificially, via legislation, raise the price of letting the human go, which has very rigid practical limits related to cost of product and the nature of competition and will consequently peter out very quickly in any case where it is attempted. Transition to this unprecedented form of automation will naturally tend to accelerate to whatever degree said automation can be made more sophisticated. That, at present, is looking quite open-ended. If that’s true — and we have no significant reason to think it isn’t at this time — then the entire process is also open-ended.
At some point in such a process, society will have to formally change its economic structure. This is for the simple reason that large numbers of unemployed citizens will eventually constitute a critical mass of opinion and potential independent action. Either that, or the displaced workers and therefore the cost of supporting them will have to be outright eliminated from society. There are no other paths. Something will have to be done to effectively deal with the former workers. Currently, there is no such accommodating mechanism in place. The closest thing to it is the Basic Income idea; but as yet, that’s not a government process, at most it represents tiny experiments, and usually nothing more than unimplemented ideas entirely within the bounds of citizen groups.
Those that persist in viewing this new wave of automation technology as similar to previous introductions of machinery are not going to be able to anticipate the changes that are coming. It’s inevitably going to be a very challenging time for society, and a very, very ugly time for many individuals until the economic and social structures can effectively deal with a non-working populace.
#1 by Robert on September 18, 2016 - 10:05 pm
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Thanks for your article. The implications you present are very provocative. It is a very exciting time in history. I hope everything works out well for everybody.
#2 by Scott on October 27, 2016 - 5:32 am
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One thing missing from this scenario, however, is the sociological impact such a move will have when customers are not willing to be doing transactions with machines. I am sure the interface will be complicated and delicate, and, at the same time inflexible. We already see the result when individuals seem to prefer talking with an actual human on the phone, instead of the automated system. My husband has already learned all the techniques necessary to get past “the system” and speak with a human. Remove the human, and he will take his business elsewhere. There are many like him. That will change over time, but that will allow for the absorption of the workforce into the service industries where human interaction is preferred.
#3 by admin on October 27, 2016 - 6:47 am
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No. You don’t understand. There will be no “interface.” Nothing to get past. You’ll be talking to an intelligent, flexible, dedicated system. There won’t be a human to “get to.”
The automated systems we have now are not intelligent. Not at all. They’re systems that translate speech into text, and then look for key words and structured information, like credit card numbers or dollar amounts. The systems that are coming won’t resemble this at all.
There will be no “elsewhere.” If I can provide you the same (perhaps even better) product and/or service at a fraction of the cost, which is exactly what we’re talking about here, I can pass enough of that savings along to the customer to make any price-sensitive person choose me over them. It won’t leave enough of a market for the competitor. That goes for everyone.
This isn’t a new device like an answering machine or “press this button to talk to enter your credit card number”, this is “hello, how may I be of service” of a quality as good as, or exceeding, a human in the same job. More patient, deeper understanding, never forgets or screws up any aspect of their job, fully able to converse and solve problems, appreciate jokes, sympathize, etc.
Humans will not be preferred when they cost many times more, and do a poorer job. The workforce will collapse.
We have never seen anything even remotely like this before at any time in human history. You can’t imagine it as a new flavor of competition. That’s not its nature. It’s more like smoke signals as juxtaposed against the internet. The only people sending smoke signals are doing it to amuse themselves, and it isn’t a service you’d pay for because you can do much better for nearly zero cost and with immediate access. That will become true of both products and services.
The only way you can wrap your head around this is to imagine the arrival of fully compliant, 100% enthusiastic, 100% competent humans who will work for free, and of which there are an infinite number available. (Now just realize they are digital people.) Your competitor now has near-zero manufacturing and delivery costs. You can’t survive in any marketplace paying a human what amounts to a living wage to do what he gets done for near zero, when your customers are not rich people who are willing to throw money around indiscriminately.
The entire social mechanism of work-for-money-to-get-things will collapse in very short order; and do-things-for-profit will go away right after that. You watch. That’s exactly what’s going to happen. It’s the only thing that can happen.
#4 by Joe on January 3, 2017 - 12:34 pm
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This human social eventuality has been in motion for thousands of years. Society has already gone through productivity jumps many times in history. It’s easier to understand what’s happening when viewed as a force-multiplier, rather than a robot apocalypse. Each time humankind was capable of more, they dreamed up more to do after the event.
Let’s start with fire, the first species to cook food. Humans doubled their productivity in energy consumption. Less time eating and digesting, they had free time to build shelters, and villages.
Then Salt was discovered to save time. Did humans relax? Nope, they built roads, trade routes, store houses, wagons, boat’s and armies to protect them. Salt turned into spices, and then into garments and other commodities. If humans never traded Salt, we would’ve never had all this new work to do around products and shipping.
Skip to the early 1900′s USA, mechanized farming equipment > 100x improvement in agriculture. Threatened the entire population into unemployment. Sure case by case might have, but overall the free time was consumed by the next dream, Urban jobs.
1960′s cars, supermarkets, home appliances made “domestic workers” 10x more productive at home. Now the next dream, women in the workforce, suburban jobs, TV/film entertainment.
1990′s paperless office. > 1,000x increase in paper consumption
2000′s cars get more fuel efficient, we have more places and longer distances to cover.
To paraphrase Thomas Edison, what happens when you take 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and are able to flip it around. 1% perspiration and 99% inspiration?
Cure cancer, work hunger, visit mars, explore the galaxy. There is no rest for human kind in our future. If all the current jobs get automated out of existence, there is no end to jobs and projects we just aren’t able to get to yet.
#5 by admin on January 4, 2017 - 3:59 pm
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I’m afraid you’ve missed my point. It isn’t that humans won’t be able to keep busy, or entertain themselves. Not at all. It’s that the current economic model, which depends entirely upon scarcity and work-for-trade-scrip, will fail to serve where there is no need for workers. We’ll need something else, something that allows for a positive social existence primarily characterized by consumption without “earning.” That will be a first. Firsts happen. There were no computers prior to the 1900′s. And there were no robots. No cellphones. Etc. To assume that AI and robotics will not represent economic game-changers is to be unduly optimistic, in my view. It won’t be a robot apocalypse, it’ll be an economic apocalypse. Hopefully with economic heaven to follow. I do expect a very rough transition, no matter what. I hope I’m wrong.
#6 by glasno on December 13, 2019 - 10:49 pm
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If we’re designing a future that doesn’t need humans, we’re going to have to go to some kind of socialism no matter how much the cold-war generation screams about “bread lines” and “human nature” being inflexible or whatever. And if a shift like that doesn’t happen it will be ironic when private property ends up being the most totalitarian system as it allows millions of “useless” workers to die (all voluntarily in the free market of course)
#7 by admin on December 14, 2019 - 12:31 pm
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We’re not. The economics of the thing are bringing it towards us very quickly without any compensating mechanism at all, while the social aspects of coping with same are being roundly ignored by the government. That’s a recipe for violent disaster.
The thing is, without great care (which is not at all in evidence) in managing such a transition, there will be a very sudden economic break that leaves large numbers of people without adequate resources. People tend to get pretty intense when they can’t feed their kids, for instance. There will be consequences of our government’s blindness to the oncoming economic impacts, and they will not be at all positive. There’s no assurance that society would survive such a break. Severe, widespread violence in the public square is powerfully transformative.
Any expectation that said workers will just lie down and die without taking aggressive action to remain extant is a form of blindered optimism.
All the signs point to society — by which I mean government — dealing with this late, piecemeal, ad hoc and poorly, just as it does most other things. But… this “thing” is not like the other “things.” This is the kind of thing that can directly break what we generally consider to be “civilized behavior” down to the very basics of survive-or-not. Those (few, sadly) of us who are looking ahead and actually thinking about this are not at all sanguine about it going down well at all.