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We've had huge increases in productivity growth via automation and other miracles of industrial engineering for two centuries. Personally, I think this is just more of the same old tired argument. The big difference is that we now have a glut of unskilled labor due to a large recent wave of immigration from cultures that don't value education combined with our sizable permanent underclass that also doesn't value education. Anybody with strong job skills is in demand and has no problem finding work. If you're struggling, maybe you should be taking an introspective look at your skill set and fix your problem.
Various periods in USA history there has been a "glut" of unskilled labor, that and or they were imported. Who do you think built most of the major infrastructure projects both public and private? We're talking from the Brooklyn Bridge to the PRR Hudson River tunnels and so much in between; vast numbers of immigrants or labor that came from Europe, Asia (the Chinese in particular) and elsewhere.
Problem is today many of those factory and other "unskilled" jobs are either gone or now require vastly different skill sets than in previous times. Major infrastructure projects cost vastly more than they should or at least did due to laws and rules designed to keep out "cheap" labor and pay union/prevailing wages. Which one supposes is all very well but is one reason why nothing "big" is really built in this country anymore, and when it is costs way more than it should. The Big Dig was a glaring example and it still goes on; just look at New York State's MTA "East Side Access" project to bring the LIRR into Grand Central Terminal.
Basic income. Get ready for it. The idle masses will not die quietly, that's just a corporate and plutonomy pipedream.
I have zero quarrel with the obsolescence of human labor. But you can't have the cake and eat it too. Just how you have to provide neutrality in globalized income/job loss, you have to provide neutrality in the shift towards institutional permanent high unemployment.
Here's the thing folks, Nixon almost got a Lite version of BI passed in 1969, so I don't know why people are all up in arms about in a 2016 discussion. Especially considering the inflation adjusted paycut this Country's proletariat has endured since women entered the work force, and people getting paid in credit became du jour circa 1970.
I won't however, let the argument slide of quietly allowing lack of neutrality within that socioeconomic shift. That's Katrina baiting. Irresponsible and aloof at best. Even govt actors won't allow it, and I know the corporate plutonomy recognizes the penny wise pounds foolish proposition of such scorched earth approach to saving on labor costs domestically. That's "Ellysium" taken to its logical conclusion. I don't think they're that disconnected. If they are, I'd be more than happy to join the mob and torch the streets. No way we're getting shelved without making it hard for the elite to go shopping with a sense of personal safety. From an American-centric slant, that would be a tyrannical socioeconomic shift, and needs to be met with targeted violence.
But like I said, it won't happen. BI will be here by the time America is majority Mexican-descent. Mark my words.
From an American-centric slant, that would be a tyrannical socioeconomic shift, and needs to be met with targeted violence.
Hence the draconian anti-terrorist laws, spying, voting fraud, propaganda AI, etc. Good luck with the "revolution". It will be nipped in the bud.
We are moving away from consumer-capitalism and democracy, back to a feudal aristocracy. If the change happens gradually with the appropriate propaganda, 99% of the masses won't even notice.
However when you dig into the numbers large amount of those new jobs are in service sector employment. Areas not known for paying lavish wages and or offering extensive benefit packages. This is where the USA is going in many areas of the country, service vs. high skilled and or highly educated employment. The latter is where you find big money over the former.
For the record here are the so called "high wage" jobs in NYC. Notice not a single one does not require college and or a post graduate degree.
Tons of our fellow citizens are living in complete denial, and, the mainstream media hasn't been doing much in the way of reporting the truth, their pop culture infatuation leaves a lot to be desired when real hard info is needed. We are heading into a new age, the rise of the machine has arrived and it's getting up steam with the arrival of new monetary norms, coupled with a society that has become numb to it's worst aspects.
The cost of all of this automation in human terms is not easily determined, but one thing does stand out in all of this speculation over the future of human employment. That would be the fact of the machine's superiority in all aspects of business reasoning. No job is beyond the reach of various human replacing, mechanized labor solutions, in fact, we have an entirely new industrial base founded on that principle.
Human labor has begun to be seen as a antiquated aspect of our "olden days" of manufacturing, it's a "smokestack" kind of labor paradigm and the investors today want big, robust, less costly, more efficient, less troublesome, AND more competitive business norms to prevail. The human is truly inefficient when compared to the machine, and now the only question is--who will own all that automata, and more precisely who will ultimately benefit from it's applications?
Those who attempt to align the past with today's labor paradigm are not considering the machine's role in the elimination of inefficient labor practices, acting as a relentless never resting pursuer of it's goals, as opposed to the old view of the machine's slow entry to business, we now have a vastly sped up version of John Henry and the steam engine. One wherein the fast changing aspects of machine capability no longer allows for the slowness of human response, and instead replaces humans at an ever increasing rate. When the human majority went from agriculture to the new industrial economy, that growing industrial base was there, what would be it's modern day equivalent? On a comparable scale, there isn't any equivalent..
Thinking beyond work, that will be our new political/economic task. Of course there will still be human labor in some form, but, the march of mechanized labor is truly relentless and therefore a thing to be taken seriously as a lasting game changer for the majority of us. This was the future view I was exposed to in school in America during the fifties. Teachers spoke of a new leisure class, instead we see the rise of a swelling underclass.
The fact that a highly mechanized economy was a bit early in it's prediction has not diminished it's potency in today's society, we realize that in all of it's forms, mechanization has but one goal, efficiency, and in that realization we should be able to see ourselves for the antiquated machines we have become. I know that if we fail to respond to it's social consequences, and, if we fail to stake out our collective interests in all of this, we will have allowed an opportunity to pass us by.
After all, haven't we already been cast aside in favor of a more efficient labor norm? Haven't we already seen the huge growth of a permanent underclass? Left unrestrained, capitalism is solely about making a profit, and the restraint of democracy is about making capitalism a viable socio-economic system. Machines can work for ALL of us. And there is no shortage of scholarly works that address the dilemma of human labor displacement. Political action is the only saving grace in a democracy, and only the truly informed can realistically participate, the rest will leave it up to their favorite political savior giving them more TV time watching "reality shows" while their own reality is vastly changing.
A growing number of people will find that they have no competitive advantage in anything that is worth a decent salary.
I haven't read the entire thread yet but the reality of this comment is scary.
Fast ford workers are demanding $15.00 an hour. I hope they've noticed their employers testing and rolling out automatic food kiosks, and fast food making and dispensing machines. They're too young to remember the food chain Horn and Hardart's food automats. They'd better wise up…..
Basic income. Get ready for it. The idle masses will not die quietly, that's just a corporate and plutonomy pipedream.
I have zero quarrel with the obsolescence of human labor. But you can't have the cake and eat it too. Just how you have to provide neutrality in globalized income/job loss, you have to provide neutrality in the shift towards institutional permanent high unemployment.
Here's the thing folks, Nixon almost got a Lite version of BI passed in 1969, so I don't know why people are all up in arms about in a 2016 discussion. Especially considering the inflation adjusted paycut this Country's proletariat has endured since women entered the work force, and people getting paid in credit became du jour circa 1970.
I won't however, let the argument slide of quietly allowing lack of neutrality within that socioeconomic shift. That's Katrina baiting. Irresponsible and aloof at best. Even govt actors won't allow it, and I know the corporate plutonomy recognizes the penny wise pounds foolish proposition of such scorched earth approach to saving on labor costs domestically. That's "Ellysium" taken to its logical conclusion. I don't think they're that disconnected. If they are, I'd be more than happy to join the mob and torch the streets. No way we're getting shelved without making it hard for the elite to go shopping with a sense of personal safety. From an American-centric slant, that would be a tyrannical socioeconomic shift, and needs to be met with targeted violence.
But like I said, it won't happen. BI will be here by the time America is majority Mexican-descent. Mark my words.
People need some sort of structure to be accountable to and keep themselves occupied.
Look at aviation. 114 years ago people didn't think heavier than air flight was possible. Then it became so. World War I advanced planes far beyond anyone's dreams - from canvass & bicycle parts to hardcore war-fighting machines. Engines got better, planes became faster & sturdier. Then came WWII and we had the genesis of jet engines. Then we got helicopters, then supersonic flight & cabin pressurization. People thought we were going to the moon next and then mars. But we didn't. It stopped improving in big leaps.
Turbine engines were the last big quantum leap in aviation technology. Since then, we've basically been just updating the model years. We've improved the engine & avionic controls through computer technology to make them safer & more comfortable. We've improved the materials to make them lighter & more fuel efficient. Computing has improved little things from autopilot to air traffic control to sensors, but the essentials are the same. What powers the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the same essential tech as what powered the de Havilland Comet - the first jet commercial airliner in 1949.
No moon colony yet and no likelihood of one in any of our lifetimes, even a baby born this morning will not see it.
We are a long LONG way from AI taking over. 100 years at least. The problems of self driving car tech is the best example of the limitations of our AI. I actually think we will need to come up with a new computing paradigm to make AI work. At the moment, our computing is based on the same "if:then" calculations used by the room-sized computers of the 1950s. They can only do what we program them to do. We have to move beyond that.
Yes, computers can do the "if:then" jobs. Payroll processing is just a bunch of if-then. Plotting a route on a map is bunch of if-then. Chess is ultimately if-then. Duh a computer can do that. We may even be getting to the point where computers can do most any job involving deductive reasoning. Medical diagnosis comes to mind as a high paid job that could be in danger from advanced computing in our current paradigm.
But can it think? Instead of just deduct from a closed domain of discourse? This is the problem with self driving cars. They work perfectly in closed courses or special lanes. In real-world conditions they get into trouble. So we may get self-driving cars, but we have to build the infrastructure for them, so how does that differ from vehicles that operate on tracks, ie: trains? We've only created a smaller, innovative type of train.
But an computers create in long-form fashion? I think the fundamental architecture of computing needs to change for that to really happen.
Last edited by redguard57; 07-30-2016 at 11:12 AM..
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Workers simply must adapt to change, and acquire the skills for the kind of work that's in demand at the time. Think about hose people who were manufacturing, selling, and repairing 8 track or cassette tape players, VCRs, film cameras, CRT TVs, and other now obsolete products. It's not only the automation and offshoring of manufacturing, but the changing technology that has eliminated jobs. Most of the time this actually results in new jobs, just requiring updated skills and knowledge. If someone in the late 1970s was a design engineer, and didn't learn CAD, they would be out of work. Administrative/secretarial workers used to need only be a good typist. Now they still need keyboarding skills, but have to know a variety of software from word processing to presentation graphics, databases, project planning and even some website management. Those low pay, manual labor jobs that have not been replaced by automation such as construction laborer and housekeeping at hotels are the only ones that have remained constant over the years. Unless a person is happy doing that kind of work, they have to be constantly working development of new skills.
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