Well if valley types have their way and automate 40% or more of jobs in the next ten years, then what actually is the alternative? This or major uprisings and violent clashes?
Universal Basic Income was first popularised (in a small way, and really only among economists) in the Triple Revolution report[1] given to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. It was a report on how the US might change in the near future, and it was the work of some very distinguished thinkers (there are at least 3 Nobel prize winners in the list of signatories). The three revolutions that made up the 'triple' were Civil Rights, Weaponry (specifically nuclear weapons), and Automation.
The first two came to pass in more or less obvious ways, but the third (automation) is only really happening now - there isn't much alternative if work is automated away unless you think having a hugely wealthy elite controlling everything while everyone else starves is a good idea.
Between 98-2004 the US lost 4 million jobs to the Chinese. In that same period the chinese lost 15 million jobs to automation.
I don't think most people understand how fast this is going mostly because we work in the part that still benefit from this.
When automated cars and truck become a reality then 12 million jobs in the us are in danger. Transportation being the one job that can't be outsourced to other countries (contrary to Europe) is the most common job in the US. Once that's gone so are their jobs.
And can we please stop comparing to farming and the luddite fallacy they are completely missing the point of whats going on right now. Did the horses get new jobs when cars started taking over?
Technology replaces jobs that require higher and higher levels of abstraction and while technology keeps improving humans only improve to the extent that technology allows them to.
Also here is another good example of a huge manufactorer who is going to get rid of all their people.
Yes and each decade less and less jobs are created. Now the kind of jobs that are created in the US are primarily either low paid jobs or temporary jobs (which means no healthcare which means much harder to live off) On top of that the cost of living is going up.
So the trend is actually showing us exactly that.
If your claim is that new jobs will be created you need to show those new jobs cause they are needed right now and I don't see what area you are referring to which should be able to take over.
Saying we don't know is not an argument when the trends show the opposite.
>If your claim is that new jobs will be created you need to show those new jobs cause they are needed right now and I don't see what area you are referring to which should be able to take over.
Predicting what the new jobs will is very hard. Someone in 1870 couldn't predict that a large percent of Americans would stop farming and instead manufacture cars, radios, and refrigerators. Those things hadn't been invented yet.
Also, sometimes automation brings cost down and unlocks demand that increases the number of jobs in total. More people worked in auto manufacturing after the factory line was invented than before, despite it drastically reducing the man hours per car.
There may be a period of high unemployment, but the cheap labor will find uses. Well, it always has in the past. Against this time might be different if automation is easy enough to replace nearly all low skill human labor.
Unless you are somehow expecting technology to stop improving and humans to somehow improve exponentially the trend is pretty clear. Machines will be able to do most of the things we do at levels we haven't seen before.
It's not hard to predict new jobs if they are there, they should already be there and you should be able to point to them.
The numbers speak for themselves. As I said the number of new jobs created have actually gone down decade over decade in the US.
The real danger is saying things like "jobs will come" thats not an argument when you can't point to it, then it just become a religious belief in something there is absolutely no evidence for.
> Did the horses get new jobs when cars started taking over?
Can horses perform many of the other jobs the average Uber/truck driver is capable of?
If we're worrying about the 30% of Foxconn workers who will have lost their jobs if the company hits their automation targets and doesn't grow at all, we ought to consider that this would still leave them employing 900,000 more people than they did a couple of decades ago in the manufacture of devices whose sales were comparatively tiny two decades ago. I don't think our desire for new types of possession is fully satiated yet either.
Machines can perform a greater and greater amount of jobs which normally only were for humans because they achieve higher and higher levels of abstraction.
Most jobs doesn't require you to be a human they require you to perform a small part of what humans can do.
So whats left are things that require an entire human which makes it a commodity.
No, I'm pointing out that the pattern of machines being able to perform a greater number of jobs previously reserved for humans has been going on for two centuries and no matter what level of abstraction the machines are performing at, the result has consistently been more stuff, not fewer jobs. The real story of China's mobile phone industry isn't one of fractions of jobs being lost to efficiency programmes, it's one of there being millions of jobs created in an industry which barely existed 25 years ago. We haven't reached peak consumption yet.
And whilst "smile, pass a Turing test and do something I haven't asked you to do before" might be a very small part of what humans can do, it's something which machines in general available aren't doing a great job of catching up on. There's even a non-trivial proportion of jobs where "be a human" is the main requirement of the job. And even in the subset of tasks where computers have gone far beyond humans' capabilities they're usually better still at those tasks with a person or thousand interfacing with them, usually in jobs that didn't exist in a less technically-enabled age.
It's not just been going on it have had an actual effect on the number of new jobs created and the kinds of jobs it is (lower paid and temporary). Also the mistake many do when they talk about this is that they look at the global trend which is basically creating more jobs in the developing world and it's doing it at a cost for westerns jobs.
The number of new jobs created each decade in the US has gone down since 2nd world war. This is the point that many don't seem to get. Outsourcing is mostly the last step before automation.
> The number of new jobs created each decade in the US has gone down since 2nd world war
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/55/Total_private...
Trend growth looks pretty steady to me, including when typists and telephone switchboard operators were being replaced at a much faster rate than machine welders. The 2000s was obviously a terrible decade, but I'm pretty sure that has more to do with the global financial crisis than any ~2007 breakthrough in robotics
You are looking the wrong places. You are just looking at the aggregate number of jobs. But thats not relevant. What's relevant is how many new jobs are created and those numbers are going down.
Also the way jobs are defined is problematic here is how it's defined.
"People are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey reference week. This includes all part-time and temporary work, as well as regular full-time, year-round employment. Individuals also are counted as employed if they have a job at which they did not work during the survey week, whether they were paid or not, because they were:
On vacation
Ill
Experiencing child care problems
On maternity or paternity leave
Taking care of some other family or personal obligation
Involved in a labor dispute
Prevented from working by bad weather
These people are counted among the employed and tabulated separately as with a job but not at work, because they have a specific job to which they will return."
