The Software Revolution 307
An anonymous reader writes: Y Combinator president Sam Altman writes about how the third great technological revolution — which he calls the software revolution — is affecting the world economy. He says, "It appears that the software revolution will do what technology usually does—create wealth but destroy jobs. Of course, we will probably find new things to do to satisfy limitless human demand. But we should stop pretending that the software revolution, by itself, is going to be good for median wages.
Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea. Trying to find new jobs for billions of people is a good idea but obviously very hard because whatever the new jobs are, they will probably be so fundamentally different from anything that exists today that meaningful planning is almost impossible. ... The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups. ... I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get."
Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea. Trying to find new jobs for billions of people is a good idea but obviously very hard because whatever the new jobs are, they will probably be so fundamentally different from anything that exists today that meaningful planning is almost impossible. ... The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups. ... I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get."
Or how about no jobs? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even if we were all geniuses, it wouldn't matter. You'd have legions of unemployed geniuses.
Re:Or how about no jobs? (Score:4, Funny)
You'd have legions of unemployed geniuses.
Pfft, big deal. There will always be work to do. Those roadrunners aren't going to catch themselves, you know.
Re: (Score:3)
If we truly ran into an era where there was no need for jobs, then I think we'd reach a currency-free society similar to what Star Trek has. I don't think that will be the case though. Technology always has a funny way of creating new industries after it kills old ones.
Remember that 200 years ago, some 90% of the US population were all farmers. That wasn't exactly flowers and roses either.
Also we need to get out of this stupid mindset where everybody defines wealth by income.
See this, starting at 4:30 and a
Between killing and creating (Score:2)
Technology always has a funny way of creating new industries after it kills old ones.
Where does this leave people between the "kills old ones" phase and the "creating new industries" phase? The summary states that "the new jobs [...] will probably be so fundamentally different from anything that exists today that meaningful planning is almost impossible."
See this, starting at 4:30 and at least to 7:00.
I read the transcript [ted.com]. The income histogram has lost a sharp dip between $1/day and ~$30/day, shifting from Bactrian to dromedary, as more economies have begun developing. But is this "dollar" in exchange rate terms or purchasing power term
Re: (Score:2)
Where does this leave people between the "kills old ones" phase and the "creating new industries" phase?
There's a term for this: Frictional unemployment. It also isn't a new thing.
But is this "dollar" in exchange rate terms or purchasing power terms? Without correction for purchasing power, the hump is further distorted by the Balassa-Samuelson effect: areas without a history of producing goods for export will have an artificially low cost of living.
He goes into that in further detail in some of his other TED talks, such as this one:
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans... [ted.com]
There's a few more as well (I'd have to go find the links.) But even in the situations you describe, so far the trend has been long term increase in both wealth AND welfare (e.g. physical health of the population)
Re:Between killing and creating (Score:5, Insightful)
>so far the trend has been long term increase in both wealth AND welfare
Until 1903 the trend had been that attempts to build heavier-than-air-flight were failures - so much so that one of the greatest mathematicians on the 19th century declared it a law of nature just 5 years before the trend stopped being true !
Until 1776 the trend had been that colonial revolutions failed consistently. Then one country won a revolution and became independent and ever since then the trend has been that they were won consistently - until about 50 years ago when the trend became "that they were given independence by the colonists voluntarily leaving" in most of the remaining cases.
Until the 20th century the trend was that building cities made plagues worse and cities got hit hardest (Black death fatalities in London were massive in every major outbreak England ever had, far more per capita than surrounding rural areas), during the 20th century that trend reversed and now when major plagues happen they mostly kill people in rural areas far from good hospitals (initial spreading patterns haven't changed - but our ability to TREAT disease has - and people close to major hospitals which are common in cities get the best odds - and that combined with quarantine means that lots of people living in close proximity is no longer a guaranteed vector of infection like it once was).
As a result - in West Africa we had thousands killed by Ebola, mostly in rural villages. Meantime in wealthier countries you had maybe one or two infections and few if any deaths.
South Africa - on the same continent, which is only a little wealthier hasn't had a single case - the USA had 3 cases, all non-fatal.
Until 1998 the trend was for every generation to have higher vaccination rates than the one before. Since then the rates have gone ever further down - and that was done by nothing more revolutionary than human stupidity.
Until 1908 the trend was that the Chicago Cubs won the world series more often than not (twice in a row in 1907 and 1908) SINCE 1908 the trend was that the Cubs NEVER win the World Series.
Trends are incredibly fragile things, so fragile that it's almost always safer to bet on "end of trend" than "trend continues" if you have to bet. The sensible and rationalist approach however is to do neither - assume that trends have no bearing on what's likely to happen and does not aid prediction at all - because they don't.
Re:Or how about no jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
>Technology always has a funny way of creating new industries after it kills old ones
I know you think you just made a logical point but you really did not. Extrapolating from past events is inductive logic, not deductive, and one of the main differences between them is that inductive logic has no guarantee of truth.
If all my premises are true, and I follow the rules of deductive logic properly, it's impossible for my conclusion to be false.
With inductive logic that is simply not true - even if I do the same experiment a hundred billion times - I STILL can't be absolutely CERTAIN that it won't fail on the hundred billion and first time.
Inductive logic can be reliable, but it's never guaranteed.
It gets worse, what you did wasn't EVEN inductive logic, it just LOOKS like it - so the above is a best-case scenario you don't qualify for. To have ACTUAL inductive logic absolutely ALL factors must be controlled during each test. Any factor that changes, ANY factor - and the reliability plummets, with every subsequent factor it gets less reliable.
You can't MAKE a statement like "what technology always does" - you're talking about a bunch of events where, at every run, almost EVERY factor was different.
So there is absolutely ZERO reason to believe the pattern you think you spotted will hold true, there is no evidence whatsoever to support your extrapolation.
The last time we had a major technological revolution there was less than half as many people on the planet - so less than half as many people wanting jobs (technically - wanting a way to earn a living, for which "sell your labour" is the only viable option most people have).
Even if next generation automation and software does generate new jobs in other sectors it would need to do so at almost 8 times the rate any previous revolution did to satisfy the demand that now exists, there's no evidence to suggest it would and the data so far suggests the opposite -it's creating far fewer new jobs than previous revolutions did.
Secondly you have to consider the requirements for GETTING those new jobs. This revolution is NOT creating new low-skilled jobs, because it's very essence is to destroy low-skilled jobs from every sector up to and including itself.
All the jobs it IS creating require enormous technical training - robotics designers, electronic engineers and programmers. The simple truth is most people lack the skills to do these jobs and even if that changed - you just don't need a lot of these people even for massive automation.
A 20-man co-op in Texas is one of the largest automation robotics companies on earth - supplying hundreds of industries. That's not new job growth.
So your pattern is already breaking down and this is still the dawn of it, who knows how much worse it will get. It also spells a major problem for the industries automating. They won't feel it YET - but if they automate too much, and enough other companies do it, they'll reach a point where they can make ultra-cheap goods - but nobody can buy them because they've put all their own customers out of work.
Destroying your own demand is bad economics - while fostering it is the path to wealth (as Henry Ford understood - on the other hand he was a Nazi sympathiser so take his ideas with a grain of salt).
Where does that leave the future ? There are many options - but it's fairly obvious that the current concept of "you must earn your right to live by working" is simply not going to be practically feasible much longer (in fact- I would argue it hasn't BEEN feasible for over 3 decades ALREADY - it's just not been bad ENOUGH for most people to figure it out yet). Buckminster-Fuller saw this coming and I've seen no evidence that he was wrong and a lot of evidence he was right.
Either way - whatever the future holds - I'm damn sure it won't resemble 20th-century capitalism much if at all.
The fact that phycisists are saying the ONLY way to maintain economic growth for more than 50 years (assuming we could use 100% of all energy from the sun which we can't) would be for over 90% of the population to be in pure service jobs - which are of course, being automated away.
Re:Or how about no jobs? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that very long period where we need a lot less jobs but not no jobs.
Consider, we could wipe out our unemployment problem RIGHT NOW if the average work week was cut to 35 hours a week. But notice how it isn't happening. I'll probably get several replies screeching about how civilization will crumble and we;ll all end up living in caves if we cut back even 1 hour a week.
I would love to get rid of the wealth=income thing, but that darned grocery store keeps wanting money for food. Way up on the high end of the income distribution, it is possible to make a change, but it seems that section is populated mostly by people who think things are good the way they are and might be better if people were twice as desperate for work.
The change is unlikely to be entirely voluntary.
Re: (Score:2)
I kept hearing biotech was gonna replace lost manufacturing jobs, but I never once heard anyone say what that meant.
Wait, what? The only thing I ever heard that was even close to that was from the lobbyists pushing for state spending on biotech parks, and even their overinflated job estimates didn't approach that. Within pharma though, dose for dose, new biotech (biologic) drugs are much more labor intensive than traditional small molecule drugs: the manufacturing process for biologics doesn't scale up very well.
Service Sector (Score:2)
There will be work in the service sector for a very long time. As the gap between the upper middle class and working class grows, it will become more common for people to afford maids, nannies, lawn care guys, etc. My household income is in the upper 5% and I currently have a maid who comes in every other week and someone who takes care of my yard. Still don't have enough for a nanny (while still saving for retirement that is), but that is what I currently have planned for my next $20k bump in salary. 20 y
Re: (Score:2)
It is so sad that you are right, I could cry...
The middle class is going away and with it the American Dream; there will be only well-to-do and poor people in a few years...
Will there be a revolt then?
Re: (Score:2)
The middle class is going away
This is because you're making the very bad mistake of measuring middle class by money. Before I proceed, let's get something clear: MONEY IS NOT WEALTH. If you define class by wealth instead of income, the middle class is growing rather than shrinking.
Watch this (start about 4:30 in and watch to at least 7:00 in)
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans... [ted.com]
there will be only well-to-do and poor people in a few years...
Will there be a revolt then?
False, false, and false, I understand that it's the common talking point among socialists/liberals/communists (yes I know they aren't one and the same, but they all
Re: (Score:2)
You're right that wealth isn't money and that classes are defined by wealth not money, and I don't have anything to say about whether the middle class as defined by actual wealth is shrinking or growing, but it is very clear that a majority of people are not middle class in terms of wealth, and that's a present problem, whether it's getting worse or better.
The middle class are those who have enough productive capital to make their own living without having to constantly borrow it from others at the cost of
Re: (Score:2)
but it's clear just from looking at some monetary statistics — the median income is about $25k, and the median home price is about $200k — that most people cannot afford their own homes, and so are not by any measure middle-class.
First off median household income is $51,939. Household income is a better measure of what a household can afford in housing. On top of that, someone with median income is not buying a median price home. Since a large portion of the lower income population rents, the median home buyer makes more than median income.
Re: (Score:2)
Since a large portion of the lower income population rents
Those people are by definition not middle class, as they are having to borrow capital — land to live on — from those who have more capital than them (their landlords), and labor for others with more capital than them (their employers) to get the money to pay for that. They don't have enough capital to just labor to obtain the resources they consume; they also have to labor extra to borrow capital from others. That a large portion of people are stuck in that situation, and thus not middle class,
Re: (Score:2)
but it is very clear that a majority of people are not middle class in terms of wealth
I think this is the key point of your entire post, and being honest, it doesn't say a whole lot.
What metric are you using to define middle class, and furthermore, where exactly does the goalpost reside, and how often does that goalpost change?
Remember that in terms of income, the goalpost is always rising, even in the absence of inflation. For example in one year you could have $20,000 being defined within the scope of middle class, and then the next year it could be defined as poverty, even though the pers
Re: (Score:2)
What metric are you using to define middle class, and furthermore, where exactly does the goalpost reside, and how often does that goalpost change?
The bulk of my post was explaining this.
Middle-class means you're neither in the exploited labor class nor the exploitative capitalist class. You've got capital enough that you're not dependent on the capital of others, and can work only for the resources you consume, not to service debts to those wealthier than you; but you don't have capital enough to live off others who are dependent on you for it, and have to work at least for the resources you consume, even if not to services debts to those wealthier t
Is self-employment for everyone? (Score:2)
You are appearing to define the middle class as self-employed homeowners. A lot of industries are regulated such that self-employment is not feasible, either by the government or by suppliers who refuse to deal with startups. How does this affect the prospect of middle class membership for people trained to work in those industries? In addition, high school civics doesn't teach skills essential to self-employment. Is government responsible for the lack of a middle class in this manner as well?
Re: (Score:2)
Self-employment wasn't meant to be a necessary criterion, but sort of a fast and loose way of describing a level of capital ownership, alongside things like homeownership. Stock ownership is a form of business ownership that doesn't require you to be "self-employed". For class-determining purposes it doesn't have to be stock in the business that employs you, either. Just so long as you're getting some of the benefits of being "the employer" (if indirectly by being part-owner of some employers of someone), b
Re: (Score:2)
I think living standards is a better word for the ability to consume. I count wealth in m2, not in the ability to consume. Land generates rent ... iPhones do not. When land ownership shifts to the top, government has to make up the difference through redistribution to not let everything snowball up.
IMO we have been able to improve median living standards through increasing government redistribution ... do you disagree? If not, are you willing to let that redistribution continue to increase?
Re: (Score:2)
Amazing that you can twist an impending failure of capitalism and the predictable consequent social upheaval to follow as somehow the fault of "socialist" social engineering and something those socialists have been trying to cause, rather than something they've been warning about and trying to avoid.
The only way society can continue to function as there is less and less value to human labor is for the productive capital to become more evenly distributed. There are lots of ways that could happen, from one ex
Re:Service Sector (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really amazing, once you realize that economy is basically a secular religion. Capitalism has its temples (banks, stock exchanges), priests (economists) trying to discern the will of the gods, those gods themselves duking it out in heaven (stocks, futures and associated financial instruments going up and down in value in a "market" largely disconnected from the real world) and myths (Invisible Hand knows best).
Soviet economy had its equivalents, and ultimately collapsed when people lost faith; its major failing was being apocalyptic (it predicted worldwide revolution) with no means of surviving the failure of the promised imminent implosion of capitalism. Ironically, the very collapse of Soviet Union seems to have kicked that implosion underway due to the resulting lack of threat of revolution to curb the worst excesses. Communism couldn't survive competition; capitalism can't survive without it.
So of course true believers blame the whole thing on human sin ("financial irresponsibility") and wish to placate the angry gods through chastising the sinners (austerity). That such measures only make the problems worse is irrelevant, because people operate on religious archetypes they project into what's ultimately accounting. Thus things like debt become huge, crushing problems rather than a largely irrelevant number somewhere far away from the flow of goods and services that make up the real economy.
Re:Service Sector (Score:5, Interesting)
Capitalism is not the 'temporary use of another class's capital.' It is a system where property is freely bought and sold.
You're conflating capitalism with a free market. They are not synonyms.
A free market is a system where property is freely bought and sold.
Capitalism is a system where the shape of the market is determined primarily by the prior distribution of capital; loosely put, where having wealth makes it easier to keep and obtain wealth, and lacking it makes it harder to keep or obtain it, automatically perpetuating that wealth disparity and leaving the less-wealthy perpetually subservient to the more-wealthy.
For a trivial example of a free market which is not capitalist, consider any market that deals exclusively in labor services, such as an virtual market online (without copyright interfering to create artificial scarcity) or a hypothetical post-scarcity market in the future; anywhere that capital is either freely and infinitely replicable or else just irrelevant. Because capital is not involved, the market is not shaped by capital distribution, and is thus not capitalist. But it can nevertheless still be a free market, with the prices of the services being traded determined entirely by voluntary agreement with no redistribution of profits or anything.
Less trivially, a real-world market, dealing with goods and services both, that had an even distribution of capital would not, at least initially, be capitalist, as nobody would have a capital advantage over anyone else to exploit. The open question is whether such non-capitalist freedom is sustainable, or whether we're forced to choose between either sacrificing freedom or accepting capitalism.
Free markets are the kind of thing that early liberals (what would now be called "libertarians") like Adam Smith and John Locke advocated.
Capitalism is something that was first identified and named by Marx, who in turn claimed that it was an inevitable consequence of free markets, a claim that the state socialists who followed in his wake accepted and spread further.
Even more distressingly though, their opponents in defense of free markets also tacitly accepted that claim (that free markets inevitably lead to capitalism), and just disagreed on which side of the resulting fork to choose: reject free markets to avoid capitalism, or embrace capitalism to preserve free markets.
Meanwhile, nobody noticed (and today most people can barely even conceive) the libertarian socialists who disagreed with Marx's claim that you can't have free markets without capitalism, who have been to this day discussing (not that anybody else is listening) possible ways to prevent capitalism without sacrificing the free market.
Just thought you'd like to know that when you say things like "[capitalism] is a system where property is freely bought and sold", you are tacitly buying into Marxist rhetoric.
Free market without capitalism (Score:2)
nobody noticed (and today most people can barely even conceive) the libertarian socialists who disagreed with Marx's claim that you can't have free markets without capitalism, who have been to this day discussing (not that anybody else is listening) possible ways to prevent capitalism without sacrificing the free market.
What introductory resources do you recommend for learning how to build a free market without capitalism?
Re:Free market without capitalism (Score:4, Informative)
The Wikipedia article on libertarian socialism [wikipedia.org] gives a good overview itself and has an extensive external links section with further resources. One other topic that I find particularly lacking from that though is distributism [wikipedia.org], but it's got its own good article with further reading too. I should note however that there are a lot of different variant strains of thought in that general area of libertarian socialism, and that I personally don't agree entirely with any one of them; I think they've all got some nice ideas but also their own share of flaws. I just like the general approach and wish there would be more mainstream dialogue with these kinds of ideas.
My personal flavor is essentially the same as the usual right-libertarian concept of a propertarian free market (that is to say, a market where rights to private property ownership are recognized), minus contracts of rent (including interest) —possibly minus contracts in general (besides simple transfers of ownership), but I'm less certain on that point — because I believe rent and interest are what cause the runaway concentration of wealth that turns a free market capitalistic, and that without them there would be a natural tendency for wealth to flow from those with more to those with less (the natural cost of the leisure those with more wish to enjoy); and that rent and interest can be abolished as widespread economic instruments without the use of any kind of authoritarian force, simply by refraining from the current use of authoritarian force to enforce such contracts, leaving such arrangements legally unprotected and thus unsuitable for general use as economic instruments (but still strictly speaking legal for trustworthy partners to engage in themselves if they choose).
Bootstrapping your capital (Score:3)
[I would ban] contracts of rent (including interest) —possibly minus contracts in general (besides simple transfers of ownership), but I'm less certain on that point — because I believe rent and interest are what cause the runaway concentration of wealth
Without rent, how would somebody new to the labor force and with no capital to his name obtain land on which to live and tools with which to work?
Re: (Score:3)
Buying it slowly over time. There are fairly simple arrangements of pure sales which look and feel very rent-like on the short term but become more and more like the straight-up purchases they really are in the long term, which allows for the legitimate functions that rent appears to serve to be served, while circumventing the large scale systematic problems that is causes. I can explain in more detail if you like, but the basic picture is (to use housing rent as the paradigmatic example) that you start pay
Re: (Score:2)
The "revolt" will be peasants with pitchforks against ED-209 [wikia.com].
The boardroom scene [youtube.com] at the beginning of Robocop is one of my all time favorite movie scenes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Or how about no jobs? (Score:4, Insightful)
My conservative relative insists "the market will find a way if you simply get gov't out of the way". I ask for examples of types of new jobs replacing those being lost to offshoring and machines, and he/she just says, "I don't know, but the market will just find a way if you just let it. Entrepreneurs will appear out of the woodwork if barriers to entry are kept low enough."
Nor is he/she clear on what regulations to get rid of. We both agree some A.D.A. (Disability Act) regulations and endangered species regulations seem overkill, but tuning those alone won't significantly change the big picture.
His/her other gov't-trimming suggestions risk health and safety problems. I don't want the US to become a dump to compete with the 3rd world. Maybe more would have jobs, but more would also be sick or injured. It's closer to a Mad Max dystopia than an improvement.
If you just have blind faith that "the market will find a way" I guess there is not much to argue about. It seems part of his/her religion. I don't get the conservative "solution". Anybody else want to try explaining?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Has your relative never heard of the term "market failure" ?
There is research to suggest that people with conservative beliefs tend to be less intelligent [monbiot.com]. They basically like to be told what to believe, which explains your relative's misplaced faith in The Market.
In my experience, right-wing principles (market knows best , regulation is bad) tend to be based on thought experiments, whereas left-wing principles (income inequality is bad, socialised benefits are more efficient etc) have empirical evidence s [wikipedia.org]
Re:Or how about no jobs? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've noticed that too. Conservatives use theories, but unlike scientists, they don't bother to see whether their theories are confirmed by reality. If reality does contradict their theories, they just assign some conservative intern to come up with an explanation of why it actually works. "The economic actors weren't following the rules!" Or "This economic boom is the long-delayed consequence of the Reagan tax cuts."
One of the most memorable examples of a conservative economist was Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago professor who wrote studies of the pharmaceutical industry. He testified before Congress that government regulations would prevent life-saving drugs to reach the market. The congressman running the hearings asked him to give an example of some of the drugs. Peltzman said, I don't know, I'm an economist, not a pharmacist. In other words, he predicted this effect of regulations, but he didn't actually go out into reality to see whether the world actually behaved the way he said it did.
For somebody like me who was raised in the scientific tradition, it took me a long time to realize that this is what they're actually doing.
Re: (Score:3)
Right wing theory vs left-wing science??!! Have any of you kids ever read actual left-wing stuff? Theory, theory, theory.
Go and read serious left wing things from a world socialist website or even Lenin's works. It is at about the same as the old theological debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
The Soviet Union with all its horrors was created by a bunch of intellectuals. In the end, the only non-intellectual Bolshevik, Stalin, was left standing.
See any liberal arts curriculum involvi
Re: (Score:3)
That is only true if political beliefs are akin to religious faith. And even then it requires the most banal definition of religion, where it's nothing but a label one applies to oneself, devoid of any content. If, on the other hand, political - or religious - beliefs have content, then of course you can be judged by choosing to adhere to them and especially for advancing their agendas.
Si
Re:Or how about no jobs? (Score:4, Informative)
"The market will find a way" is a reasonable truism, but I'm not convinced that people really know what it means. What many people misunderstand, I feel, is that the market is as viciously Darwinian as biological evolution is. That is, "the market will find a way" may bankrupt companies, or even entire industries, leaving many people out of work. It's not a promise of a positive outcome, but if given a chance, people *may* find new markets and opportunities for themselves. Note that, in fairness, there's no reasonable way to answer your question, because that's like trying to predict future inventions or trends - just like it would be impossible to predict what evolutionary trends would be successful until they're tried out.
Anyone who has any sort of understanding how cruel nature is can also understand why we can't leave *everything* to the tender mercies of the market, because it values profit and efficiency above everything else. That's fine, so long as we understand that capitalism is exclusively an economic system, and doesn't really concern itself with humanitarian or other non-economic issues.
As such, we have to put reasonable rules, limits, and restraints on the market, in order to make sure things we value aren't sacrificed on the alter of profit. The trick is to find the proper balance between over and under regulation. Over-regulate, and you quash innovation and genuine enterprising spirits that would otherwise generate wealth and prosperity. Or, you can simply price yourself entirely out of global markets that choose not to regulate as you do. Under-regulate, and you allow exploitation and shady practices to flourish, because cheaters have an inherent advantage against those who don't choose to cheat.
I think that many conservatives, having grown up in an era with fairly strict government regulation over most of industry, tend to see many areas of over-regulation that comes from the natural growth and spread of nearly any large bureaucracy like the government, and see what harm it causes in massive waste and inefficiency. This is especially true if you run your own business, or are involved in the running of a business. It's no real surprise that small business owners tend to be politically conservative. However, they probably haven't really seen first-hand what businesses would do without fairly strict governmental oversight, as has happened in the past here in the US, or still happens in other parts of the world.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, I'd totally agree with you there. Small business owners and large corporations are two entirely different entities, and have very different issues to deal with.
One of the big issues is that while small businesses employ a huge number of people, it's hard to to collectively represent their interests, since by nature, the power of large corporations is more easily concentrated and directed.
Regarding political power by large corporations... An argument many conservatives would probably make is that the m
Re: (Score:2)
His/her other gov't-trimming suggestions risk health and safety problems. I don't want the US to become a dump to compete with the 3rd world. Maybe more would have jobs, but more would also be sick or injured. It's closer to a Mad Max dystopia than an improvement.
And what's the trend here in the US? It's to declining employment and declining quality of employment in a world which is going the opposite way. It's not working. You say you don't want a dump now? Well, I don't want a dump in fifty years.
My view on the matter is that most of the social safety net and most of the regulations we implemented to make our lives better are now rebounding on us and dragging us down relative to the rest of the world. It's time to make some sacrifices, to make the present a bit
Re: (Score:2)
Human sacrifice has never once in history saved whoever practiced it. But this time is different, because the Invisible Hand is a greater god than Tlaloc or Baal.
It's pathetic how obvious it is once you see modern economy as it really is: just another religion hiding behind claims of rationality. And one currently going through typical end-of-line panic with associated frenzy of sacrifices and penances.
Re: (Score:2)
No we can be pretty sure that central planning doesn't work. People who keep insisting on it just prove insanity by repeating the same actions and expecting different results.
We can also be pretty sure that if people don't have a way to earn a living provide for themselves they will take it out on society.
Re: (Score:2)
You need to brush up on your economics or control theory.
Central planning was proved not to scale far back as 1915 by Von Mises. If you want something more current, take a look at any parallel processing system. If you insist on having a central control node the Your parallelism is going to be limited by the ability of that node to process information from the other nodes.
TLDR; Central planning doesn't work because it discards the efforts of almost all the population except the central planners. Unless the
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't seen any good survey to confirm or deny their numbers. The Internet and World Wide Web came about mostly from gov't research projects, I would note.
That would be DARPA
The D is for Defense, you really want the D.O.D running the economy ?
Anyway the internet is more a counter example than a supporting example to your point. The initial internet was meant to be a military communication system that could operate when large numbers of links were destroyed. Almost all the growth in the internet and it's usefulness comes from things that couldn't have been planned for or foreseen at its creation.
Don't think so ? look at I.P.V4 4 billion addresses were
Re: (Score:2)
The initial internet was meant to be a military communication system that could operate when large numbers of links were destroyed.
No it wasn't; that's just an urban legend. The ARPAnet was a way of allowing researchers to share resources. Thus, a user in San Francisco could use a computer in Los Angeles, and wouldn't even need a new, dedicated terminal to do it. Its resilience has more to do with the poor state of telecommunications at the time demanding it, and certain design features that allowed for a useful combination of efficiency and flexibility.
As for why it was funded by DARPA, that was where there was money.
Re: (Score:2)
If you are going to go around correcting people at least get it right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET; only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.
Also nobody was talking about WHY DARPA funded it.But it's good to know in your universe that's the only place with money.
Re: (Score:2)
The internet (and a lot of research in general) came from a goverment program that gave money to fairly free universities and research institution. Academic Freedom is a important principle for this reason.
Citations? (Score:3)
The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology; it was an anomaly in that sense.
Citations? Evidence? That second sentence is actually the whole basis of his argument... and it's just baldly stated with no supporting evidence anywhere.
I am sorely tempted to call bullshit. I'm not positive it is but I strongly suspect it is.
Re:Citations? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually... the industrial revolution resulted in a severe disruption for workers with many dying homeless, of starvation or exposure.
Then the generation AFTER them did okay and we simply forgot about those who literally died of effects of the industrial revolution.
This could be very similar. A generation of misery and then the one after that has different expectations and training.
The trend has been pretty ugly- lower share of societies benefits for most- higher share of societies benefits for the very few- often related more to their parents success (50%) than their own ability. I mean- a lot of the better jobs are practically inherited these days.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny... the grandparent suspects the article is wrong because it provides no citations. Your answer? To assert the article is wrong, without providing citations.
Re: (Score:3)
The industrial revolution allowed us to make things less expensively. What took 100 man-hours could be produced in 10, or 1. With it came the rise of unions and a power struggle between the robber barons and the working classes. The standard of living of most people in the industrialized world skyrocketed, with a good deal of the wealth trickling into the new "middle class". Industrialization made things, but required manpower to run them.
The rise of technology has made manpower obsolete. We're not making
Re: (Score:2)
No, I like your gut instinct. There is no evidence that the Industrial Revolution was an anomaly in job creation. As Maxo points out, it wasn't all just job creation anyway. Lots of craftsmen and all kinds of people were out of business and disrupted.
But there were no little craftsmen making giant bridges and buildings; that was new stuff and new jobs that didn't exist before. There will be new stuff and opportunities in the next technological revolution.
Re: (Score:2)
The opposite also shouldn't be taken on faith: that new technology creates at least as many jobs as it replaces (with roughly equivalent wages). There is no mathematical proof either way that I am aware of. We can only observe history, not the future, to verify any "principles of economics".
If the economy is humming at full capacity, then indeed it perhaps may find a way to employ everybody; but as we keep see
Re: (Score:2)
There is no mathematical proof either way that I am aware of. We can only observe history, not the future, to verify any "principles of economics".
Right. But I don't know of any historical trend showing that technological advances = fewer jobs and lower standard of living.
I'm not arguing with his point that software will do that. Maybe it will; I have my doubts. I'm saying that the premise on which he bases his whole argument seems to be little more than a blue-sky assumption. I don't think it's even taken on "faith".
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot is not a peer-reviewed science journal. Other people here are not your under- or un-paid research assistants. Or chimpanzees for that matter.
That's right! That's exactly why I wrote "I don't say this often on Slashdot."
When you are spoon-fed relevant material and shown where you can find much more VERY EASILY, it's time to quitcherbitchin'. Nobody is being paid to shovel the information down your throat, just because you're too lazy to do it. You don't get to claim it's not there just because you won't look at it.
There was no "spoon-fed material" here. There was when I wrote that, but there wasn't any here. I know you're trying to snark at me for saying that before, but the context is so vastly different it just doesn't fly.
Sufficient new jobs are no longer created (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
There are thousands of years of substantiation. And the alternative is that no one will want anything. I don't agree with doom & gloom on this point.
Software is the wrong villian here. (Score:5, Interesting)
It appears that the banking sector will do what they usually do—extract wealth and destroy jobs.
The most serious problem our economy faces is the mountain of private debt we have accumulated in the past 50 years. And the huge wealth imbalance this has caused.
The banking sector has successfully transformed most asset markets into heavily leveraged ponzi-like schemes. Each new entrant to the market pushing up prices with borrowed money, so that other people can cash out. This borrowed money caused asset prices to rise, giving the appearance of creating wealth. But debt levels end up rising faster. When the market runs out of greater fools, the bubble collapses, leaving the mountain of accumulated debt mostly intact.
While the bubble is rising, the economy begins to depend on the creation of new debt just to continue functioning. Once the debt gravy train slows down, it doesn't even need to stop, the flow of spending money in the economy dries up. Companies that were pretty much already insolvent go bust, others survive by tightening their belts. It is the workers losing their jobs that suffer the most for the problems that the financial sector created.
We can't repay the debts the financial sector lent out. The only question left is how we choose not to pay them.
We need a huge shift in how we create and manage money. We need to drastically shrink the parasitic financial sector, wipe out the loans that represent most of our money supply. And replace the money created with credit cards and home loans with government fiat currency, given directly to the people.
Managing the flow of money is essential to keeping people employed.
Re: (Score:2)
But countries with tighter regulations on debt are still facing the same middle-level job problems that debt-heavy countries have. While debt may be a contributor, it's probably not the main cause.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Your premise hinges on the debt gravy train, which you say just 'slows down', but then you leave it there like it's already been explained.
You leave out all that borrowed money. It still exists. Where is it? Yes, the the flow of newly borrowed money may dry up, but what happened to all that money that was already borrowed? Who has that money now?
What you're missing is that the 'financial sector', which is not the monolithic entity that you make out, has little choice in the matter. The biggest borrower will
Re: (Score:2)
Money isn't a commodity like gold. When a bank issues a loan, they create an asset and liability at the same time. When you pay a loan back, the asset and liability are cancelled out. Most of our spending power is based on ledger records in a bank's double entry book-keeping system. But as an entire country, we haven't been paying back our loans at all. Each year we've borrowed more than we've repaid, even when you take inflation into account.
If you're running a business, your income is based on what your
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Software is the wrong villian here. (Score:5, Informative)
Christian law also prohibited usury for the longest time. (Until around the Protestant Reformation).
It's the reason Jews were villainized as greedy schemers: Christians (in Christian lands) were legally prohibited from lending at interest, but Jews (not being bound by Christian law) could, meaning that they were the only ones doing it, and getting all the flak for it.
Even then though, and still today in the Muslim world, there were complicated work-arounds involving a combination of an "interest-free" loan, insurance, and rental, which created in effect a loan at interest, and is part of why the Christian world eventually let up on prohibitions of usury, because it was effectively happening anyway despite the prohibition of it. The loophole there, as I see it, was failing to see that rent is precisely the same thing as lending at interest, or rather, that interest is a special case of rent: it's just rent on money.
In any case you're lending capital temporarily in exchange for a permanent transfer of even greater capital back to you, which causes the problem of wealth concentration, redistributing wealth from those who have less of it (and thus need to borrow it) to those who have more of it already (and thus can afford to lend it out), which has the secondary effect of requiring those with less of it to labor for those with more of it in order to continue borrowing to survive, in effect creating perpetual servitude of a working class to an owning class.
And when technological revolutions make labor less valuable, that kind of class division becomes unsustainable, and either the working class has to just die off, or take some capital for themselves by force —unless everyone can see the undesirability of either of those outcomes, and change the system somehow to let the capital flow back from the leisure class to the labor class, as it naturally would without such concentrating influences as rent and interest.
Re: (Score:2)
So are they basically just selling the house at a much higher price? Does the bank then have to buy the house from the seller first and then resell it to the buyer to accomplish that?
Re: (Score:3)
We're not in the "software revolution age" (Score:4, Insightful)
We're in the "war" age. The last 120 years have seen huge advances in the ability to wage war. That is what has driven world economies, and continues to do so. Look where the internet came from - DARPA. Integrated and Large-scale integrated circuits came about from military research [wikipedia.org]. Space travel came from ICBMs, which came after the A4 (aka the V2) proved it was practical.
Without that stimulus, we would not have advanced anywhere near as fast.
It also serves to provide employment for a lot of people.
Re:We're not in the "software revolution age" (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The last 120 years have seen huge advances in technology, and war, along with steel making, agriculture, power generation; has scaled accordingly.
War itself is not any bigger than it used to be, and might even be a bit less in this day and age. Well, the case could be made.
In any case, the Soviets really and truly scared us into inventing some of that. You can't just say, 'Let there be DARPA'.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter have obviated your argument. War still exists as an incentive for innovation, but it is less prominent. Any programmer today who wants to make money or make an impression has to come up with an app that appeals to ordinary humans.
Does any programmer care about DARPA or their nasty association with surveillance on citizens, with CIA, with spyware ... ? Our time is about enabling citizens, privacy, and online freedom. There are still profits to be made in
Let me save you some time (Score:3)
We need to make full time 32 hours a week or less (Score:5, Interesting)
We need to make full time 32 hours a week or less with forced ot pay maybe at 40 hours and X2 ot at 60+.
Re: (Score:2)
That's crazy talk -- I bet you sympathize with those cheese-eating surrender monkeys [wikipedia.org].
Um... (Score:2)
Babysit (Score:2)
Suppose that we create some software that *seems* perfectly capable of replacing some specialization of attorney. All other subject matter aside, like the obvious idea that attorneys would likely move heaven and earth to put a stop to it, suppose that this tech is adopted. Yay! Cool! We can each get an attorney for the price of a AAA video game. Happy dance?
No! Bad dance! Don't do happy!
That software attorney has one immutable quality
Re: (Score:2)
That software attorney has one immutable quality that could and absolutely should have a strong influence on how we regard it. It's not human. While it may be able to formulate expressions of law, prescribe paperwork, and maybe even construct strong arguments based solely upon a cold, mechanical interpretation of case law and legislation, it can not and never will be capable of feeling. If we exact the effect of law while sacrificing our humanity
Are you seriously arguing that lawyers are humans with feelings as regards their profession? You're too funny :-) Based on far more references than I could ever cite they long ago sacrificed their humanity in the name of war on terror / drugs / civil forfeiture / etc. The computers might at least get some of the obvious cases right like the Bill of Rights if we're being more serious or this case that the humans missed if we're looking for obvious mistakes:
http://theweek.com/speedreads/... [theweek.com]
Wrong perpetrator (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not the technology itself.
The problem is the banks and corporations that siphon off billions by leaving prices artificially high instead of passing along the cost-savings of technology to consumers.
Seriously. What is Apple doing except sitting on billions it's siphoned off? It's not even paying it's fair share of taxes on that money! Or the big banks, who get levied huge fines for their outrageously illegal behaviour, but just bill the consumer for the expense and see none of their executive or board members put behind bars.
Unless and until we resolve those problems, technological advances will just be a convenient red-herring scapegoat for distracting us all from those real problems.
Farm (Score:2)
"Trying to find new jobs for billions of people is a good idea but obviously very hard because whatever the new jobs are, they will probably be so fundamentally different from anything that exists today that meaningful planning is almost impossible."
Return to the land. Farm. Raise up your own food and some extra. Harvest your own local fuel. Build your own house. All of these things are doable and it brings your cost of living to nearly nil. No need for 'jobs'. Be.
Re: (Score:3)
That may be true, but there's a reason people are running AWAY from the farms in droves. People aspired to do other things besides working the land, and modern society made that possible.
I think we'd be moving backwards as a society if we essentially forced everyone to go back to agriculture in order to survive.
Re:Farm (Score:4, Insightful)
How the hell are the poor schmucks stuck renting a bedroom in someone else's house going to get their hands on even bare land, much less the tools and materials needed to do anything productive with it? Land is about the most expensive thing there is. If everyone owned their own land we wouldn't be in this problem — people wouldn't have to worry about putting up with their shit jobs just to make rent and not get thrown immediately out into the street. People would have a leg to stand on, economically, and could actually bargain for a fair value for their labor because they wouldn't be entirely dependent on borrowing other people's capital (like land to live on) just to survive another day.
Re: (Score:3)
That is exactly the problem with rent. It's a cost that gives no asset in return, preventing people from building wealth even as they labor and earn more income than they need to pay for what they consume. How is someone who can barely make rent ever going to save up to buy any land anywhere? It's not like they can just start putting their rent money immediately toward interest-free payments that go entirely to building them equity in land. They need to save a big chunk for a down payment first, and then a
Re: (Score:3)
Land prices differ for reasons. Cheap land is going to be unproductive, for the most part.
Re: (Score:3)
Return to the land. Farm. Raise up your own food and some extra. Harvest your own local fuel. Build your own house. All of these things are doable and it brings your cost of living to nearly nil. No need for 'jobs'. Be.
But not for everyone. We're not going to get seven billion people to stay alive that way.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. Free Public School is Too Expensive (Score:3)
Property taxes pretty much rule this out.
Where I live taxes on the land (20 acres of rural farmland) are almost 300 USD a month! That's pretty hefty rent on property you already own.
Kind of hard to just be when you can lose the farm and everything you're worked for to the county if you don't make enough $.
The social safety net will have to trend up? (Score:2)
If we extrapolate from current trends, then our owners will totally dismantle the social safety net, the former workers will turn to petty crime and then be incarcerated in the newly privatised prisons. ref [inthepublicinterest.org]
Ways to pick good oligarchs? (Score:3)
> The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups.
I have sometimes mused about feasible ways to make this work. In other words, just accept that tech IS going to concentrate power in small groups and just ensure that the small group is people we actually want to have that power. Republics are supposed to do that by giving the elected officials the ultimate authority -- by definition, a small group with lots of power -- but that hasn't worked so well by some measures when tech gets involved.
I don't have any good answers here, but I figure that along with brainstorming ways to prevent the consolidation of power, we might also brainstorm ways to be happy with the results of the consolidation.
I love this line about "Bad AI/Good AI" (Score:2)
If we can make a bad AI, maybe we can make a good AI that stops the bad one.
Kind of like how the NSA is doing good spying to counteract all the bad spying.
Tough problem, one I hope we can solve (Score:3)
This topic is near to my heart. I grew up in the Rust Belt during the early 80s. During this time, the last of the good manufacturing jobs were being automated or offshored in my home city. We're seeing the same thing happen, but this will be a different group of people. The city has tried everything to regenerate economic growth, reorganizing the economy around "knowledge work", funding he universities and what little industry is left. The problem is that the population is largely unemployed factory workers, who have no skills and are not really trainable for "new economy" jobs. The only economic mobility for these people is winning the lottery or hitting the jackpot in a personal injury lawsuit. (I would love to see sociologists prove the negative correlation between economic mobility and number of ads for ambulance-chaser attorneys on local media.)
"That's mean", you say, "The market will take care of these people." The problem is that these peoples' lives are not going to get better. My hometown back in the day used to have auto plants, steel mills and other manufacturing that ran three shifts all year round, and they employed thousands of people per shift. The workers had stable jobs, retirements covered by pensions and union deals, and made a comfortable middle class living. They were able to buy cars, buy houses, and send their kids to college. They were even able to buy the occasional nice thing and weren't living day to day.
What's different this time? Low level knowledge work is on its way out. There are no secretaries anymore, tech support is offshored or automated, and service jobs are being replaced by machines. I can't remember the last time I went into the bank since I was able to deposit checks on my phone...see, I'm part of the problem! The next logical step is going further up the knowledge worker chain. I've worked in many corporate environments (in IT mostly) and have witnessed tons and tons of jobs that can and will be replaced by software or a changed process. That's good, right? I wonder about this -- those mid level knowledge worker jobs are the last ones in the economy that pay a decent wage for something that the average person can handle. I realize I'm generalizing, but think about this - Joe/Jane Average coasts through high school, gets into college, and parties for 4+ years. At the end, they graduate with a degree in business, psychology. communications, whatever. The economy that is about to be replaced has a place for millions of these people...corporate jobs that involve taking a stack of input work, performing a process on it, and passing it onto the output stack. These millions are the ones paying taxes, buying houses, and buying cars to commute back and forth to that office park in suburban Atlanta, Dallas, New Jersey, etc. When those jobs dry up, the same "Detroit Effect" will happen - maybe to a lesser extent, but you will have a segment of the population who isn't quite able to train to make the next step. The city I lived in was a close cousin to Detroit -- the local economy dried up and the city just started rotting from the inside. Crime went up, property got neglected because no one could afford to fix it or live in it, etc.
Solving this is going to be a monster problem, and one I hope doesn't require a revolution. But really, how do you explain to people that the answer to the next phase of the economy is to have some people not work, and have the workers subsidize that? Or tell someone that the retirement savings they built up over 40 years is now meaningless? The problem is that everything is organized around wealth and work -- nothing short of a disaster is going to easily change that. The only things I can think of are a British style aristocracy where knowledge workers become servants or other low level employees, or some sort of feudal system.
Re: (Score:3)
People can and do live simple happy lives without technology. In many parts of the United States the Amish practice non-technology religiously.
However as long as people are free to make choices (and presented with adequate information) most people will choose the faster, more accurate, and more efficient method every time. Trying to limit innovation in order to continue to prop-up work that could be accomplished without manual labor is unlikely to succeed in the long run -- as the person or group who succ
complete bullshit (Score:2)
It appears that the software revolution will do what technology usually doesâ"create wealth but destroy jobs.
And create jobs too. If technology "usually" destroyed jobs without creating other jobs, then almost none of us would be employed.
It's also worth noting that globally jobs are being created just fine and wages are going up just fine. How can one comment on this while missing the biggest, most important labor trends of the past 500 years?
Don't give these oxygen thieves the time of day.
establish a base class (Score:2)
Some years ago a euro country proposed establishing a base class for their humans. Essentially their plan is to replace the myriad of social services offices with one office that sends out checks to people who are out of work or underpaid.
They would establish a basic income that allows people to pay for food, shelter, and clothing. If a person earns less than the minimum, the state subsidizes the balance. if they are unemployed, they get the entire amount. As long as enough effective people are paying taxes
But why do we want to find a job for the masses? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
but there's also no end to the small one-person projects that can be done, and people can and do make a living like that, here in 2015.
Yet even some of the most popular projects that are used by both FOSS and proprietary products and companies are woefully under-resourced (OpenSSL) and underfunded (GPG).
The GPL is democratic. (Score:2)
That's the point of the GPL. It doesn't matter if one or many projects are disfunctional. The code they produce is available to everyone so they still contribute to progress on software that belongs to everyone. What could be more democratic?
Re: (Score:2)
Most independent app developers lose money these days.
So really 4 billion dogs fighting over 1 bone ? I don't think that's the democracy anyone wants.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The efficiency that progress brings is immediately siphoned off by the powerful and few elite, so the common man's struggle always remains. If it weren't for evil, we could all be living in a utopia.
Re: (Score:2)
Who pays for the technology that replaces all those old jobs? Who pays for the maintenance and up keep? Though the technology does replace certain niche jobs, it does not replace all jobs. Until we can create what ever we want, food, clean water, gadgets, etc... just like replicators in Star Trek, you will always have a labor force. And just like any organization, you need leaders to provide direction, you need people to do the work and you need people to do the support work that has nothing directly to
Re: (Score:2)
There is no Utopia anywhere in the world, never has been and never will be. Human nature prevents such a system. Sure, I think the majority would be up to share, but there is a minority of people that would take without contributing to society, and the other end of the spectrum would contain people that abused that system to get more than their share.
Wait, in YOUR utopia you have to work for stuff? In mine we all float down a river on inner tubes with endless supplies of sunblock and limeade.
Re: (Score:2)
The only way to increase wealth by reducing the number of jobs is to increase the worth of the remaining jobs or to increase material trade.
Jobs are a form of trade (trading your services for money). Every trade/transaction provides both parties an increase of value or worth; the employer deems the services received to be worth more than the money, and the employee deems the money to be worth more than his or her time. Throw billions or trillions of transactions together, you have an economy.
So reducing t
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Time repeats (Score:4, Interesting)
To make people jobs back in the industrial revolution we had to fight for the rights of workers. Very hard. And with a lot of bloodshed. As the industrial revolution had also destroyed old family structures where the young cared for the old, and the healthy cared for the sick, we had to invent retirement funds and health care systems. We also required to develop an unemployment protection. Furthermore, an education system was required to educate the people. In addition we got higher output from farms and industry. As we had a real demand gap, as not all people had sufficient clothes and food, an massive increase in production was a good thing to support them.
Now in the next step we will eradicate a lot of jobs which were suitable for present day humans. The new jobs which are created are all for higher education or caring jobs. However, most of present day workers could not be educated in a way to reach higher education. This is impossible. Furthermore, we have now no gap in demand of important resources in the Western world. Therefore, the workforce will be reduced. As the state is normally funded based on income tax of workers, this has also an impact on state finances. A solution would be to tax profit, but present govenrments try to avoid that.
Therefore, time does not repeat. The preconditions are quite different. The effects are different. And the outcome will be different. However, to stay in your picture. We will have to fight for our rights again. Including unconditional basic income, education towards self-improvement rather than wealth. Taxing profit, finance transactions etc. and it will cause a lot of bloodshed.