Reddit mentions of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

> Now, robot slaves might be a good thing until they gain sentience. Then we might end up in a matrix type situation, if we're lucky, or a Terminator type situation if we aren't.

Read Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots. The real problem with robots is not that they will become self-aware but that they don't pay income taxes. It kind of leaves the public sector in the toilet unless we let AI become politicians.

One word, technology. It is the realization of the capitalist system dynamic we have and the ever increasing automation through improving organizations/algorithms/robots. For more on this theory, check out Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537

tldr: jeżeli twoja praca nie polega na pracowaniu twarzą w twarz z innymi ludźmi to masz przechlapane.

edit: postępu technologicznego nie zatrzymamy ale jest jeszcze szansa tak pokierować swoją karierą aby jakoś dociągnąć do emerytury.

Good to hear from someone who was actually in the industry that I'm not too far off base! I think there is a widespread misunderstanding about the causes behind the collapse of U.S. manufacturing and the rise of the rust-belt cities. While cheap imports may have been what triggered the crisis, they were simply revealing inherent inefficiencies in our manufacturing industries that we ignored for too long. No matter how much we wish, we can never go back to way things were. Technology and economic development simply won't let us.

The real scary part is that if we fail to learn this lesson, we're going to be in for quite a few more rude awakenings in the future. A great book on the topic is Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford.

A good read on the coiiapse of jobs...

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537

Martin Ford. Even people who don't like his argument have praised the book for it's clarity.

This is probably the closest I've seen:
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537


There's several articles on the topic though, from a few different angles ( with a few links to studies in most of them):

Consumer
http://time.com/money/4797898/self-driving-cars-could-soon-save-the-average-family-at-least-5600-a-year/

https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/7/15935126/google-uber-driverless-car-waymo-autonomous

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-26/self-driving-cars-could-change-your-life-within-six-years/8987628

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/demand-for-driverless-cars-could-boost-uber-to-2016-09-19

https://www.wired.com/2017/06/impact-of-autonomous-vehicles/

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/self-driving-cars-will-disrupt-10-industries-commentary.html

http://www.esa.doc.gov/reports/employment-impact-autonomous-vehicles


One thing to keep in mind - there's three transformations happening at the same time. The first is autonomous vehicles, the second is the conversion to electric vehicles, and the last is the "Transportation as a Service" (TaaS) movement. All of these are happening at different speeds in different ways from different companies, but they all add up to a huge difference in societal interaction. TaaS combined with autonomous vehicles will ( In my opinion) be the largest driver for the type of change you're talking about - from no longer needed parking lots to shutting down the network of gas stations, the world of 2050 likely looks nothing like the world of 2010 in this regard. Los Angleles has 30% of it's space devoted to parking lots. If no one owns a car, those spaces can be reclaimed for something more useful.

You probably don't want to read books like The Second Machine Age or Rise of the Robots then. Self-driving cars are the least of our problems. Consider what we're going to be faced with when automation replaces roughly half of all jobs in the United States over the next 30 years. Truck driving is already headed that way.

Anyway, I work in automation, and unless there's a major (like life-altering) change in government policy, we are all going to be proper fucked in a short amount of time. But at least we'll get there faster in our self-driven cars.

There are a lot of people who took (and misunderstood) Econ 101 classes and now think their Anarcho-Capitalist/Libertarianism is sound policy. It isn't. It's incredibly destructive in the real world, and I'll explain why. I'll even put a TL;DR summary at the end of each point, for the lazy, since this is a goddamn wall of text.

People talk a big game about how "labor should be a negotiation between employer and employee", and how if you don't like the wage offered, you can "just walk away". Or, worse, how unskilled laborers should just "go to school and get some skills so they can be skilled laborers". These talking points all belie a complete misunderstanding of the phenomenon of market failure, and the ways in which real life does not always conform perfectly to the theory you heard in class.

First, labor is, in most circumstances, not an equal negotiation between two parties with equal leverage. When you have rare or unique skills in high demand built up over a lifetime of work and education, sure, you can afford to negotiate over your salary until you get what you want. You probably have a decent savings, and time probably isn't a huge factor.

For the rest of the population, the "negotiations" are extremely one-sided. For so-called "low-skill" jobs (people always mention burger flipping, ditch digging, etc), the prospective employee has virtually no bargaining power whatsoever. If a company offers you a wage, and it's not enough for you to live on, you can either walk away from the job, or accept it. There is no negotiation to be had. The employer has four jobs to fill and 150 people who want to fill them. Good luck.

Summary: Employment is a buyers market, and employees (especially those to whom minimum wage applies) do not have sufficient leverage to negotiate for a living wage, even if the job they're applying for creates a significantly higher economic surplus for the producer.

Which brings me to our second issue: time sensitivity. A lot of people who are, you know, alive, have bills to pay. - health insurance, food, shelter - and those bills can rack up quickly. Without a good safety net, people who are faced with the choice between taking an exploitative wage and, essentially, risking starvation, homelessness or illness, will choose the exploitative wage. Desperation causes people to accept wages that are significantly below the value of their work; as long as there are poor people, there will be a steady supply of workers willing to trade their labor at unfair prices because the alternative is unacceptable. This is the real leverage a company has against prospective employees: McDonalds won't go out of business tomorrow if it doesn't find a burger flipper at it's desired price, so it can hold out at a low wage until someone is desperate enough to accept. Job-seekers rarely have that luxury.

We saw this in spades before the minimum wage existed; people had their children working because if they didn't, they couldn't afford to feed those children. Do you think those workers had the opportunity to negotiate for a fair wage? Of course not. The employers had near-absolute market power (as they still do, the only exception being a price-floor on labor that limits just how much exploitation can occur), and the workers had virtually none. In some industries, there are decent unions, where collective bargaining is a real possibility; this is not the case for most minimum-wage jobs. Most people simply can't afford either the lost wages.

Summary: workers (especially those without high-demand skills) cannot afford to spend time searching and bargaining for better salaries, and often have no choice but to accept unfair wages or suffer consequences.

So, we've explained the unequal market power that disrupts the so-called free sale of labor, and the desperation that causes people to accept a wage below the value of said labor - which brings us to the next problem: education.

A lot of people believe that a living-wage should be reserved for only skilled workers. This has always been somewhat elitist, but was somewhat viable as a model back when education costs were reasonable, but things have changed. The ratio of tuition-cost to minimum-wage (you know, the jobs you're supposed to have while you get educated?) has gone up over 5 times, adjusted for inflation. Someone working a minimum wage job in 1976 could work for about 10 weeks to cover tuition; now, it costs 50. One can only afford to be a full time student if one is also as full time worker...except, once this money goes to tuition, there's none left over for food, rent or anything else.

Now, it's virtually impossible to work a full-time entry-level job while also paying your tuition. As such, students who want to "become skilled workers" are forced to take enormous student loans, some of which are fair, and many of which are not. Many student loan companies are extremely predatory, and the interest rates students are charged are very high. This not only means that a student is less likely to be able to afford school, but that they will be able to save far less money after school, meaning time is a larger factor

Summary: Education costs have risen disproportionately to minimum wage, and as such, "becoming a skilled worker" is much more cost-prohibitive than it was 40 years ago.

Fourth, we reach the issue of "lost jobs" - i.e. that "a job below a living wage is better than no job at all, and forcing people to pay minimum wage means fewer people will work."

This is an outright lie, perpetrated by corporate apologists and Libertarians misusing theoretical microeconomics and trying to apply it on the macro level to justify exploitation. Jobs are not disappearing en-masse as a result of minimum wage increases.

The second thing that most people fail to realize is that people will, generally, try to cobble together a living wage by working more than one job. If jobs pay more, people can stop working two jobs, and instead work only one; this means that job, previously someone's second, can become a primary job for someone else. The end result is that, as the study linked above states, there is no correlation between minimum wage increases and job loss.

Summary: Minimum wage increases are not correlated with decreasing levels of employment.


Finally, we have to deal with the question that no one on the anti-minimum wage side wants to address: social good.

A higher minimum wage, assuming employment levels stay constant, mean that more money ends up in the hands of the working poor. The working poor have the highest marginal propensity to consume, and economic measure of how much of a person's income is actually spent, rather than saved. This means that a large portion of these higher wages will be spent and injected right back into the economy, increasing demand for goods and services. This will, in turn, mean more profits for the corporations that supply those goods and services, meaning they can afford to pay those higher wages more easily.

This results in decreased overall poverty, which means not only a healthier economy in general, but a healthier society; crimes of desperation go down with poverty rates, and formerly impoverished people with new, higher incomes tend to reinvest them into themselves and their communities (as demonstrated by the Basic Income experiments in India), thus making America a better place to live in general.

You may be asking "but won't this cause inflation?!" The answer is "only a little". High inflation is generally only a major problem in economies that are either 1)printing money at an absurd rate, as in Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic, or 2) are rapidly developing, and supply is struggling to keep pace with demand.

The United States fits into neither of these categories, and as such, a relatively meager increase to the minimum wage is unlikely to cause significant inflation in a robust, highly developed economy with a more measured pace of growth. Remember, inflation is not just "more money" existing, it's the phenomenon of "too much money chasing too few goods". If supply is able to keep up with demand (as it has in the United States for decades), inflation is a relatively small problem.

The major exception to this is the "stagflation" of the 1980s, which caused almost entirely by OPEC, due to the fact that oil became extremely scarce and drove up costs all over the economy without driving up wages. This was a completely different phenomenon from regular, run-of-the mill inflation, and unrelated to questions of minimum wage.

Summary: Raising minimum wage means less poverty means less crime and other social net positives.

There are, of course, caveats; yes, raising minimum wage can incentivize some businesses to automate more quickly, meaning that jobs will be lost. However, this is only a change in time-frame, since those jobs were going to be replaced anyway as automation becomes cheaper, more efficient, and more capable of replacing higher-skilled humans.

For more information, I highly recommend Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford, on the coming problems associated with increased automation, and the options we have, as a society, to solve them.

There is a terrific book on this exact topic that was also a NYT Bestseller: Rise of the Robots

>Except, empirically, it shows otherwise.

Actually, minimum wages have been shown to cause job losses: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/economy/seattle-minimum-wage.html

The Berkeley study covered restaurant workers only. A different University of Washington study compiled data from all sectors in Seattle, and showed far worse results:

The University of Washington researchers found that the minimum-wage increase resulted in higher wages, but also a significant reduction in the working hours of low-wage earners. This was especially true of the more recent minimum-wage increase, from as high as $11 an hour to up to $13 an hour in 2016. In that case, wages rose about 3 percent, but the number of hours worked by those in low-wage jobs dropped about 9 percent — a sizable amount that led to a net loss of earnings on average.

Yeah surely the rents don't help, but if you make the minimum wage $100/hour, you will have fewer jobs. This is econ 101 stuff.

As for the automation replacing jobs thing, the experts on AI/robotics are mostly in agreement on this. Check out:

The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and one of the most cited scholars in information systems and economics, and Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT,

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, by Martin Ford.

High-Skilled White Collar Work? Machines Can Do That Too NY Times article

It's not really a question of when, it's already happening.

Consider how:

Turbotax and automated payroll systems have replaced a significant % of accounting positions

Wall St firms need fewer employees because most trading is now automated

Highly automated Amazon warehouses means fewer employees are needed for retail and malls shut down

Law firms now need fewer new associates and paralegals due to legal software

Universities can hire fewer teaching assistants due to educational software

In the ports of NYC and worldwide a few engineers controlling robotic cranes have replaced tens of thousands of longshoreman unloading and loading ships

Many newer behemoth companies like Facebook and Google are worth far more than old guard firms like GM or Walmart but require only a few hundred to a few tens of thousands of human employees...

And technological progress isn't slowing down, it is speeding up. Think of the approximately 20 million drivers who will be almost surely out of a job within the next 2 decades as self driving cars and trucks hit the roads.

Yes there will still be jobs, but a surprising number of them are being and will continue to be automated, at an ever increasing rate. One cashier watching 10 self-checkout scanners replacing ten cashiers is a good example of the jobs that might still require humans... until you replace her too with a robot.

Neither tariffs nor high minimum wages will change this trend. UBI is really the only long term solution.

Por enquanto a Inteligência Artifical é "estreita", ou seja, apesar de já poder aprender ainda não tem consciência de si mesma e é dirigida a funções específicas. Há todo um artigo deste livro sobre isso. Por enquanto estamos muito longe que tal aconteça. Quando isso acontecer, dar-se-á uma "singularidade" segundo Ray Kurzweil, com consequências debatíveis e imprevisíveis - imagine-se uma máquina capaz de condensar toda a inteligência e toda a informação existente que começa a auto-melhorar-se. Será bom ou mau para nós? Nem o Stephen Hawking é capaz de responder a essa pergunta.

Really the jobs have been replaced with automation and technological advancement. Imagine you sell widgets. A robot comes out that cost a tenth of what you pay your employees but is 100 times more efficient. The benefits of switching to automation are staggering in this case.

This is explained in great detail in Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.