Self-Driving Cars Will Boost the Job Market, Says Marc Andreessen (recode.net) 295
A future with self-driving cars has induced a lot of anxiety about a resulting loss of jobs, but in fact, they'll create tons more jobs, Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen (Wikipedia) said at Recode's annual conference on Tuesday evening. "The jobs crisis we have in the U.S. is that we don't have enough workers," he said. From a report: "It's a fallacy," Andreessen said (specifically citing the lump of labor fallacy and the luddite fallacy). "It's a recurring panic. This happens every 25 or 50 years, people get all amped up about 'machines are going to take all the jobs' and it never happens." Andreessen used the example of the rise of the automobile industry a century ago, which many thought would cost the livelihood of everyone whose jobs were to take care of horses. But "the car then created not only a lot of jobs creating cars" but everything else that happened because of the car: Paved streets, restaurants, motels, movie theaters, apartment complexes, office complexes, the entire buildout of suburban America, etc. "The jobs that were created by the automobile on the second, third, and fourth order effects were 100X, 1000X the number of jobs that blacksmiths had," he said.
"It never happens". (Score:5, Interesting)
'Playing Russian Roulette is perfectly safe, I've done five rounds so far'.
The jobs that went away in the past were the trivial ones, where you may literally have been able to replace a person with a transistor or automatic valve. (Elevator/lift operator).
There were plenty of newly available jobs for people of average skill to move into.
The game-changer today is not that any particular field is being automated, but that in many places, the robot is equal to 'the person of average skill'. ... jobs go away, that is an enormous hollowing out, with masses out of work.
If all of the delivery, warehousing, farming,
The new jobs may be around, but increasingly the new jobs leverage computers to solve with a team of 20 (that may get very rich) problems that used to take thousands of employees.
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No, but we need to do better than the Right's drumbeat of "only the lazy don't have jobs". If we continue to worship corporatism and capitalism we could end up with large numbers people starving because they aren't capable of getting the education and skills they need to get a job. That's a significant number of people.
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Simple solution. Stop having so many babies. Let the population decline until it stabilizes at a point where there are enough people to fill the jobs with a little slack left over.
That's what happens in the wild. When too many animals are born and there isn't enough food to sustain them, the population dies off until it reaches equilibrium with its environment.
Humans should be no different. Reducing the human population would also have side
Re:"It never happens". (Score:5, Interesting)
Repealing protections will only make the situation worse, as will ripping up trade deals.
At some point, the right wing is going to decide that universal income totally fits into their ideology. To pay for it, we'll end social security, all federal funding will be distributed as block grants and left up to the states to allocate to universal incomes as needed, which will in most red states to be tax cuts to the wealthy. Kansas may be spared this as they seem to have already realized again reganomics don't work.
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I suspect the finger pointing at "big government regulations" will dramatically increase as right-wing voters lose jobs.
As well it should. Regulations have strangled the ability of anyone without significant capital or venture capitalist backing to just go out and start pursuing an independent vocation. It's hurting the existing small businesses to prosper and expand. The last few years have been bad for small businesses, which is directly related to why the recovery has been the slowest we've seen US history. The top two reasons small business owners site as the things hurting their business is the cost of healthcare and ov
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Because education isn't something you poor into someone's ear and suddenly they are skilled.
Not everyone can be an engineer, doctor, or even a programmer as far as that is worth. Some people can not benefit from training.
This problem was written elegantly a long time ago by Kurt Vonnegut in "Player Piano".
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Also, can't we finally accept that people having to work less could be a feature of more technology, not a bug?
In my opinion, automating away a lot of work and instituting a universal basic income sounds amazing. I'd love to see people freely choosing to spend their time pursuing hobbies, raising their children, pursuing a job out of passion rather than need, getting education, playing games, taking walks in park, reading, watching television, or any of the billion other things that humans can do when we're
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I very much agree that this should be seen as feature rather than a bug!
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However, I think a lot of people, will have problems with finding a meaningful way to occupy their days. Playing games and watching television seems awesome when you don't have the time. And there will definitely be people that will be OK with that. But lot's of people with have problems with 'having no purpose.
I expect that to be an issue harder to tackle than the financial side.
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I agree that long-term, most people won't find these kinds of pursuits satisfying. There will be a transition period as people who are used to getting their self-worth from their jobs and income will need to figure out new ways of feeling good about their days. Long-term, I believe most people would spend more time nurturing their relationships and their communities, taking care of their homes, and pursuing education and hobbies that they find satisfying.
cut full time down maybe 32 hours to start and ot (Score:2)
cut full time down maybe 32 hours to start and add an X2 or higher OT level on top the 1.5 level in place now.
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Sure, prioritize more jobs by reducing the number of hours people work (making sure they are receiving higher wages so they can still live). That's definitely a good step while we're still ramping up to full automation :D
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Also, can't we finally accept that people having to work less could be a feature of more technology, not a bug?
In my opinion, automating away a lot of work and instituting a universal basic income sounds amazing. I'd love to see people freely choosing to spend their time pursuing hobbies, raising their children, pursuing a job out of passion rather than need, getting education, playing games, taking walks in park, reading, watching television, or any of the billion other things that humans can do when we're not chasing paychecks.
I agree that working less should be a feature not a bug. The problem is money and leisure time is not being correctly distributed. The people at the top are working the longest hours, getting the most money per hour, and getting the least leisure time. The people at the bottom are having a hard time even finding full time employment. UBI will not fix this. Even the most generous proposals still have UBI as the bare minimal amount of money to survive. I don't want to live in a country where if your luc
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In addition to lowering hours, we need to lower wages at the top and raise wages at the bottom.
Look, I'll happily give up on UBI if we instead
1) guarantee full employment
2) divide up the work so nobody is working more than is pleasant
3) acknowledge that raising children is work and merits an income so people who want to can stay home and do it
4) reduce income inequality enormously. I'm sick of the argument that only the owner of the hotel is necessary to running the hotel and should therefore be paid thousa
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Look, I'll happily give up on UBI if we instead 1) guarantee full employment
Which is equivalent to UBI. What do we do if someone can't find a job they can do? Guaranteed full employment means we create a make-work job for them. How is this significantly different than just handing them money for doing nothing? The costs of the employee will outweigh the money they earn; it will be cheaper to just hand them money. So your condition here is basically disingenuous. You'll stop supporting UBI if there is something just like it under a different name.
2) divide up the work so nobody is working more than is pleasant
I find any work unpleasant. Just han
Re:It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it. (Score:4, Insightful)
What UBI assumes is that:
1) All members of society should share in productivity gains.
2) Working for someone else isn't the only way of being productive.
3) Money isn't the only --- or the best --- way of attaining status or self-worth.
4) Most humans have a desire to be productive in some way, and that desire can best be fulfilled in a self-directed manner.
5) There's plenty of fulfilling work available, even if that's just participating in vibrant relationships and communities and taking care of our homes and our hobbies; we don't have to make work as if we were in 2nd grade and the teacher needed a break so he or she gives us those busy-work assignments most of us hated.
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And those assumptions can be categorically dismissed by observing communities where three generations have lived on welfare. It seems that UBI is pushed by people who have never spent significant time in these sort of communities.
Re: It's a bug, not a feature. UBI will not fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
The few who control the wealth right now already DO see low-wage workers as resource leeches, and they've pulled the wool over the eyes of most other people. That's an attitude that has to change. The attitude is the bug of the current economy.
Re:"It never happens". (Score:4, Insightful)
And even if everyone can be an engineer or a programmer - that doesn't help.
Look at for example amazon warehouses.
The algorithms that drive the robots in the warehouse are not going to be done on a local warehouse level, but programmed globally, running on one of a few different platforms.
You can have a smart algorithm that drives robots around, and another smart algorithm that knows how to pack boxes, and suddenly a team of a few dozen has removed the need for many thousands.
Similar or worse gearings happen - facebook, for example has likely killed way more media jobs indirectly simply by taking screen-time away from the media sources, with very few employees.
Apps aren't much help - everyone has 24h a day, and their screen time is monopolised by a handful of apps. The remainder of the market is not significant.
Even if everyone was to become skilled enough for the 'new' jobs that are displacing the old, it doesn't help much, as there are so many fewer of them.
We need to somehow fundamentally re-engineer what 'work' is and how it's paid - the alternatives are very, very bad.
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It isn't until after they actually lose their jobs that the economic consequences will be felt, and only then will anything meaningful happen.
That doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to be thinking / planning / experimenting now, so that if / when that occurs we can act based on data, rather than randomly.
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Err....and just why can't they get the education and skills needed to get a job?
Because the real world isn't Lake Wobegon, where "all of the children are above average".
In the future, nor will all of the children be better than the average automated replacement. (The replacements won't be dumb machines as they were in the past; for the given task they'll be as intelligent as the humans). Employing those people won't make economic sense.
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Err....and just why can't they get the education and skills needed to get a job?
Like GP said, maybe they're not capable. Not everyone's born to be an engineer, no matter how much they apply themselves. We try to train everybody for something, but we need some mechanism to employ (or at least feed) people with naturally limited abilities. Maybe telling a 55 year old coal miner that he needs to learn to code or be unemployed isn't practical. This isn't the jungle where we leave the weak to die while the rest of us progress.
education = an 4-6 year 50-200K piece of paper (Score:2)
education = an 4-6 year 50-200K piece of paper. And that loan can't be discharged with chapter 11 or 7.
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Start considering options for structuring human behavior other than capitalism.
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Unfortunately that only works if everyone is willing to play-ball. The Soviets and the Chinese have both demonstrated that there will always be people that seek more and will find ways to get that more even if the system is supposed to be equitable.
The other side-effect of especially the Soviet system is that if one is not in the group that benefits disproportionately, and one sees that one cannot benefit, it's much easier to just stop caring and to let one's self be supported by the dole rather than to ap
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Your whole argument is a false dilemma. There are plenty of steps between capitalism and communism. Plus that continuum isn't probably real either.
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My argument is not a false-dilemma at all. My argument is in favor of some position between the two.
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"...for a lot of people that incentive comes from avoiding abject poverty..."
If the fear weren't "abject poverty" but instead "needs to figure out how to feel good about spending their time" because the former were out of the question, the motivation would shift to the latter and that would be better.
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Given the popularity of Survivor and The Real Housewives of $City I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you.
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You're working with a population of people who are either stressed out from work, stressed out from not working, being told that they are worthless and lazy if they don't have a job, being told they will become worthless and lazy if they lose their job.... there's no control group. we're just speculating. Sure, maybe I'm wrong, but maybe you're wrong. Either way, I'd like to find out and then deal with that.
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It means we need to start talking about how society will function when there are not enough jobs. That will require we do things like stop branding the jobless as "lazy". As well as looking at fixing regional effects - the job losses will not be geographically uniform. We're going to have to do something with the next rust belt, and it's going to have to be a much stronger response than the last rust belt.
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Humans outpace automation because the total labor cost for a human to adapt to a new niche is lower than the total labor cost to use automation to do the same. But ... what if that fact becomes false? The idea of a wage job no longer makes sense from a business point of view. Pointing that out isn't doom mongering or saying progress should end. It's just a reality check, the worst case scenario should be explored and planned for. The other side are saying we shouldn't even think or talk about the possibilit
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There is no inevitable march. We stop tech all the time, if it interferes with the prerogatives of the patent or copyright holders, or annoys someone wealthy enough to sue or fabricate a psyop against the tech, as Exxon did with solar and auto makers did with electric cars.
The question is: WHO gets to stop tech when it hurts them. In one case, the wealthy turn change on and off at will. In the other, we stop tech to save our own lives, as we don't need to automate many things. Automation is happening becaus
Re: "It never happens". (Score:2)
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The issue is that there are only three practicable solutions based on our current sociopolitical and economic environments:
The issue with the first two is that a large segment of the population dies, and we likely lose 20-100 years of productivity as a species while the wounds are being licked and rebellions quelled. The issue with the last option is it is a path to guaranteed class divisions which become set in stone at a generational level over time (if you have free wealth to sustain yourself now you an start a business, because there are businesses to be started, if you have free wealth to sustain yourself along with everyone else there is no such option because anything you can do everyone else can as well.) The current system sucks, but it at least affords some mobility (people born poor can work to middle class, people born middle class can work to wealthy, people born wealthy can work to elite, etc.) Under UBI you end up with everyone starting poor (wealth is by definition a measure of your ability to control labor, if everyone has the same amount it doesn't actually exist) except for a few people who control the industries/machines, who damn well will be plotting to take over other sectors because that's the type of people they are. Under UBI you have a moderate to long period of complacency followed by a guaranteed 2-class system with 1 guy and his family in the upper class.
How about instead of a 2-class system, we try option #4: Everyone work less. If everyone works less then the number of jobs available increases. If we have 10 million people but only have 5 million jobs, then it makes more sense to give everyone 20 hours a week instead of giving 5 million people 40 hours a week and 5 million people zero hours a week.
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Indeed. Or rather automation ("weak AI") is getting to a point where it can fake the performance of an average person in a standard situation well enough to be overall superior to that average person. Most work-hours for most people are standard situations. (I basically have none of these, and some people here will have the same, but that does not invalidate the point.) If you, say, replace a fleet of 1000 Taxis with self-driving cars and add 10 remote operators for the few situations the car cannot deal wi
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Consider the following:
-The median annual wage for a trucker that works for a private fleet, such as a truck driver employed by Walmart, is $73,000, according to ATA. The Labor Department pegs the median annual sal
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Manufacturing by itself doesn't boost the economy by much. Putting 10,000 people to work building stuff does boost an economy. As now you have 10-20,000 people who go out to eat, buy stuff( clothes the cars etc). Who wouldn't be able to before.
As robots take over the wage slave jobs productivity of the company goes up but local economy goes down as you don't have as many people living working and playing in your area. However what no one realizes is that as production automated smaller more agile companie
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Manufacturing by itself doesn't boost the economy by much. Putting 10,000 people to work building stuff does boost an economy. As now you have 10-20,000 people who go out to eat, buy stuff( clothes the cars etc). Who wouldn't be able to before.
When John Deere opened a new factory, they received 10,000 applications for 800 positions. New factories don't need that many people to operate them.
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That is the point. Automated factories don't need the people. So small companies can do more with less which makes them agile enough to take out the big guys by offering a lower price due to having lower executive compensation.
Also look at John Deere competitors. Sure they have the name today. However if you look you will also see thousands of people trying to move away from John Deere as the equipment is expensive to maintain,( requirement special people and tools to do things like change a speak plug).
S
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This would be a fine answer if it wasn't for the fact that the world only needs a finite number of tractors.
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Re:"It never happens". (Score:4, Insightful)
Point missed. What jobs will it make the labor available for? High-end jobs only this time. One of the saving graces of the industrial revolution is that it required more warm bodies than it required skilled labor.
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What jobs will it make the labor available for?
Ones that can be automated, and replaced with robots and machine learning, of course!
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1. People who like to stir things up whether they believe what they're saying or not (i.e. trolls)
2. People too dumb/naive/uninformed to understand what's going on, and/or are susceptible to media hype (we'll just call them 'fools')
3. People like you and I, who know that The Sky Is Not Falling, most of what we hear is HYPE, and that there's no reason to get all upset over it.
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Also, the game-changer that will really raise consciousness is that the high-end, well-paying jobs requiring massive skills will be ended. This round, It's not just the average schmuck that's gonna live in his kid's basment for the rest of his life. It will be lawyers, accountants, CEO's, and much of middle-management. Welcome to the party, pals.
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Labor has been shuffled.
Labor has never been extinct.
This has never happened.
This. Has. Never. Happened.
We are about to make extinct Prolekistan's only export. Things like "making music" are negligible; there will be no remaining export. And if you have any business discussing this subject, you know damn well what happens to countries with no export.
Re: "It never happens". (Score:2)
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There were plenty of newly available jobs for people of average skill to move into.
That is obvious in hindsight. But in 1920 many people didn't see that blacksmiths could become pizza deliverers.
There is no reason to believe "this time is different". SDCs can open up huge opportunities for new services.
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So, what will the ex-pizza deliverers do? I don't think many of them can be retrained as rocket surgeons.
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The idea of economies is supposed to be something that helps a maximized number of people to get their basic needs. This type of statement is putting the importance of capitalism before the basic importance of providing people to live. Not to mention it's an attempt to purposefully misunderstand why the current wave of change is different than the previous changes like the industrial revolution.
Never Happens (Till it Happens) (Score:5, Insightful)
As they say in the stockmarket:
Educating our general populace to a higher degree will help, but at some point the knowledge curve will be too steep for most people to get educated enough to get a job that really adds to production. There will be jobs gains for sure from new and novel activities, but I'm willing to bet starting in 5-10 years job destruction will far outpace job creation. You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?
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You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?
Marc is probably hoping many do as the 1% loves nothing more than lots of workers to keep wages low and workers easily replaced. Supply and demand is one of the few parts of economics that is well understood.
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It's flat-out ludicrous to think that old patterns won't repeat themselves unless you have some evidence about that. You have to assume something to plan ahead; that's not to say you can't control risk (that's largely what my Universal Social Security is for in a general sense), and even that requires assuming that people will continue to be greedy, self-serving, and generally prone to economize.
Whole new economic sectors have repeatedly emerged with the creation of new technology. When we invented the
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It's flat-out ludicrous to think that old patterns won't repeat themselves unless you have some evidence about that.
The evidence is that this work revolution has the ability to automate the very class of job that people moved into during the last work revolution. Last time we automated the simple jobs, we were also creating a bunch of simple jobs in the process, that warm bodies could perform. But now we're automating away the jobs that only require warm bodies. The situation is new, why would the old pattern recur?
Re:Never Happens (Till it Happens) (Score:5, Informative)
Past performance is an indicator of future results. The problem is people interpret results poorly.
I keep repeating this: technical progress increases wealth by reducing costs. Costs are ultimately wage-labor. There's one sustainable way to reduce cost: reduce the wage-hours invested in producing a thing.
Each technical improvement first eliminates some jobs. That gives you transitional unemployment. Lower costs mean lower viable prices, which draws luxury goods down into wider markets: it costs little enough for you to target 100,000,000 middle-class consumers instead of 1,000,000 upper-class consumers, you can price it low enough to target a bigger market. That means either current producers or new competitors will try to take the market and make a bigger profit by lowering prices.
Once prices are sufficiently-low, a good is just a consumer good. Everyone has smart phones now--even poor people--so we compete on price at the bottom and on the spread of prestige across income classes. We have economy cars and luxury cars. The lower-class goods have slimmer margins to try to capture the wider market; as costs come down, we start packing more features into these goods, reducing their price, or both.
So, what happens with those lost jobs?
More features means applying more labor. If you cut costs and then increase features rather than lowering price at a certain market level, then you've invested your displaced labor into producing more stuff--each of those new feature components requires labor, and you shift it from the now-cheaper components to the previously-not-incorporated components.
If you're not boosting features, then you're competing on price to capture those low-end markets. Prices come down in terms of labor-hours--that is to say, prices increase more-slowly than wages for non-changing goods as those goods become cheaper to make. The most extreme form of this is prices decreasing.
Examples?
Cars and phones pack more features into roughly the same price or the same proportion of spending (people tend to expend the same percentage of their income on cars; phones tend to keep at the $350, $500, or $900 price points and pack features, rather than inflating). Hard drives and SSDs tend to fall in price per gigabyte; we see hard drives in particular shipping ~$100 units that keep increasing in capacity (500GB a decade and some ago, several TB today).
Food and clothing increase in dollar-price, but more-slowly than inflation (median household expends 33% of its spending on food in 1950, 12.5% today; 12% on clothing in 1950, 3% today).
New technologies outright fall. Cell phones were available for $4,000 in 1983; small hard drives used to cost hundreds of dollars; and new types of display panels come out at multi-thousand-dollar price ranges for a given size and then fall to a few hundred. SSDs also generally sell by size, and so the 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB models keep falling in price, instead of simply changing the available capacities at a price point as with hard drives.
When the proportion of spending on the same goods falls, consumers have more money. They spend that money on new goods. That requires shipping, retail, and other logistics, all domestic; it also requires manufacture or service provision, which may be domestic or import. This is where new jobs are created.
Caveat: Transitional unemployment means exactly what it says. You eliminate jobs with technology, you need to wait a while for the markets to move around and create new jobs. There aren't new jobs waiting for these people; if there were, we wouldn't have 5% unemployment.
That means, yes, technology eliminates jobs; and, yes, technology creates new jobs. They're in proportion, and there's a lag between them. Both sides are arguing from one absolute, and so both sides are wrong; both sides also typically make ludicrous assertions, like the job-creation assertion that 1 human is replaced with 1 machine
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It's measured in weeks or months, usually. Generally I measure by the numbers instead of by individual people.
Counting people individually is unethical. 5% unemployment rate. Joe loses his job; you want Joe to get a job right away, right? Do you know what that means? That mean Dave, who lost his job 2 years ago, is ineligible for a job because Joe is more-important.
I'm not prioritizing Joe or Dave. We have 5% unemployment because lower unemployment consistently leads to more people entering the jo
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but I'm willing to bet starting in 5-10 years job destruction will far outpace job creation. You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?
If there's a lot of delay due to regulations and the technology matures, we'll eliminate trucker sand taxi drivers rapidly. That will cause sudden increases in unemployment, leading to a recession. No further discussion because we shouldn't have conflict on this outcome.
If we facilitate the technological change, then businesses will have a risk spread. The technology is expensive, unproven, and risky. This impacts strategic decisions based on risk tolerance and risk appetite.
Early-adopters will buy
lowering the age of Medicare eligibility can help (Score:2)
lowering the age of Medicare eligibility can help / have an limited expanded SS age lowering for people automatized out a job and don't fit to in a token safety driver job to run out the clock till Medicare that are to old for HR to hire them as entry level in an different field.
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You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?
Do you think 1850s farmers all became truck drivers?
This isn't just a short term "we've seen this before". We've been automating away tedious tasks since the beginning of time.
Re: Never Happens (Till it Happens) (Score:2)
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How hard will it be to teach a manufacturing robot to replace a circuit board?
Health savings (Score:2)
Perhaps the healthcare savings from the ~40 million people per year injured in car crashes, and their increased productivity and incomes, will create a lot of jobs. Plus the 1.3 million people who die every year in car accidents are able to buy nothing currently, and will become active consumers.
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Fewer road traffic accidents also means less work for the health care industry, for emergency services, vehicle recovery services, body shops...
Thanks for pointing this out. Almost everyone I see dismissing the economic impact of driving automation ignores the giant web of interrelated services that will get disrupted. Right now, stores are often placed in locations that get good traffic going by. Is automation going to change the traffic routes? Quite likely yes, as most phone GPS systems already pay attention to traffic volume and accidents. Is automation going to whisk people past those stores while they're browsing porn? Also quite likely yes.
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Perhaps the healthcare savings from the ~40 million people per year injured in car crashes, and their increased productivity and incomes, will create a lot of jobs. Plus the 1.3 million people who die every year in car accidents are able to buy nothing currently, and will become active consumers.
It seems like now you are just losing jobs in the healthcare industry. You know how we often discuss taxes here, and some states are net givers, and some states are net takers? If you look at individuals, most are net takers. I'm not suggesting I want people to die, I'm merely suggesting that it doesn't really help the economy, on the whole, that this small fraction of people doesn't die. I do disagree with Marc, though, if only because I can't see where all the new jobs are supposed to come from. The
It's already happened (Score:3)
Also, everything he described was infrastructure bought and paid for by tax dollars. Folks don't want to pay those taxes anymore and the infrastructure spending has more or less stopped. The build out of suburban America was financed by tax payers. They paid to pave the roads, run electricity, phone & internet, etc
Re:It's already happened (Score:5, Informative)
Also, everything he described was infrastructure bought and paid for by tax dollars. Folks don't want to pay those taxes anymore and the infrastructure spending has more or less stopped. The build out of suburban America was financed by tax payers. They paid to pave the roads, run electricity, phone & internet, etc ,etc. They're done. They don't want to pay anymore.
As near as I can tell my taxes haven't fallen much. What has changed is that taxes on the 1% have fallen dramatically due to tax cutting, shifting things to capital gains, tax shelters, and keeping money overseas. What has also changed is that a dramatic drop in the middle class has meant that less taxes are paid by many people as they simply make less. If a greater share of the total income was taxed at middle class rates it would be a windfall for government coffers.
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Not to mention that the post-WWII boom was at least partially due to the investments the US made in its people, especially through instruments like the GI Bill. A lot of that was paid by taxes on the upper-income brackets. We have a government culture where policy is set by the highest bidder and proper taxation is nearly impossible because of it. Tax the rich (not even at post-WWII which were arguably too high) and actually fix our infrastructure and we have a good start at makeing the landing a little
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Yet they *still* pay approx half the taxes in the US....so, you're saying they should pay 3/4 of all taxes...or maybe all of them?
Re:It's already happened (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet they *still* pay approx half the taxes in the US....so, you're saying they should pay 3/4 of all taxes...or maybe all of them?
If they are receiving 95% of the benefit, they should pay 95% of the taxes. We can argue about what percentage of the benefit they are deriving now, but if you measure it in dollars, it's way over 3/4 of the total. Also, if you accept the argument that forcing people to pay taxes on necessities is slavery, then it's obvious that a whole lot of people should pay no taxes at all. If the super-wealthy want the rest of us to shoulder more of the tax burden, then they can share more of the profits. If they don't want to share with us at all, then they're going to have to exterminate us, but a) that may turn out to be harder than they expect and b) if you eliminate all the weirdos then you eliminate all the culture and then you will have to create more weirdos, it's much more efficient to learn to live with them instead.
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there were decades of unemployment and social strife during the industrial revolution before tech caught up (and wars thinned the herd) and we returned to near full employment.
Good. Someone actually sees the whole issue instead of crying that all jobs will go away/no jobs will go away.
The argument has merit, but I think it is wrong (Score:2)
Because before, human-operated technology was replaced by other human-operated technology. That is, for the first time in history, not the case anymore.
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We're not replacing 100% of all human operations in any productive pipeline with non-human operations, so that is still the case.
Irrelevant (Score:2)
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The largest benefit from self driving cars will only come with their ubiquitous use... and that will not happen for a VERY long time. All it takes to royally screw up traffic is one idiot.
Of course, in the long run. . . (Score:2)
"In the long run we are all dead." - John Maynard Keynes
There is a lot of debate on this, so why not hedge our bets and rollout UBI? Either you believe more jobs will be created, in which case UBI just reduces the tax liabilities of everyone or you believe jobs will just disappear, in which case the UBI prevents an economic collapse. Win-win, all around. Can we just roll out UBI and move on with life, already?
If you are worried about people not working after UBI, make it low enough to live off of but not LIVE off of.
Is there a 'Laffer Curve' for robotics? (Score:2)
The Laffer Curve for taxation is mostly just a fraud used to justify low taxes on high earners. But that doesn't mean there's not a 'valid' thought experiment involved. Yes, a 100% total tax rate would probably provide 0 revenue. That doesn't say anything about a 90% marginal rate, and in fact, the 50's kind of demonstrate that a 90% marginal rate is still in the section of the curve where higher rates bring in more revenue.
But it sounds similar to the argument that once the robots get smart enough to do
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Well, if you want to equate tax avoidance schemes with 'working more to earn more because it's not taxed as much', be my guest. A bit disingenuous of you, but hey...
Jobs won't cut it anymore (Score:2)
Revenue and jobs impacted (Score:2)
Self driving vehicles will have a profound affect on:
* The truck driving industry ($726 billion industry)
* The auto insurance market ($200 billion)
* Speeding ticket revenue ($6.2 billion annually - only counting speeding tickets and not other moving violations)
* Taxi and limousine services ($19 billion)
Just to mention a few of the obvious ones I bothered to get some numbers on. Self driving vehicles will represent the largest and fastest impact on humanity that technology has ever caused. Even the introduct
Look who skipped history class (Score:2)
But "the car then created not only a lot of jobs creating cars" but everything else that happened because of the car: Paved streets, restaurants, motels, movie theaters, apartment complexes, office complexes, the entire buildout of suburban America, etc.".
Is this guy trying to feed the stereotype that Americans don't know history? Out of his list only "suburban America" did not precede the invention of the car by at least 2000 years (movie theaters don't count because they are just another form of theater). Perhaps he meant "cart" not "car".
Self-driving cars will promote lazy brains (Score:2)
IBM/Watson (Score:2)
I love the fact that IBM is currently running ads on YouTube showing off Watson in situations where THE... WHOLE... PREMISE.... of the ad is that it's taking jobs away from skilled workers.
Proves he doesn't know (Score:2)
> The jobs crisis we have in the U.S. is that we don't have enough workers,
We have PLENTY! I know three people who have engineering degrees who cannot find a decent job in the Silicon Valley.
What we actually have is too many CEOs who will not hire perfectly capable Americans.
Problem is WHO get the jobs. Won't be the fired. (Score:2)
As the post subject says, jobs may be created. But the ten or twenty million cab and truck drivers will not be qualified, by age, location, skillset, or social contacts to get those jobs. And especially in the case of well-paid truck drivers, tens of millions who depend on the income of their driver family member will be impoverished as their wages are cut 75% or more, with all the crime and drug use that engenders.
The point of the Luddites was not to stop the future; they wanted to be compensated by those
In other words, he has no idea (Score:2)
In the seventies and early eighties, as IT was coming in hot and heavy, they'd talk about all the good jobs that will be created in the information economy.
This fool has *no* realistic ideas at all. And as a billionaire, he has no idea how working class people - that's 80% of us (even if you don't think you are, you *are*) start working, or earn money between other jobs, or even just want a job that doesn't need a lot of thinking while you're working on your Masterpiece....
He needs to be taxed, along with a
The end game? Robot corps talking to each other (Score:2)
Let's extrapolate.
AI and automation continue. Accountants, lawyers, some engineers, coders, logistics planners, truck drivers, project managers slowly, then instantly, disappear.
The profits go into the pockets of the management, the CEO layer, and capital funds who own the companies. Stockholders, sure, but as we've seen, corps do not pay dividends any more. You make money by playing guess-the-future-price in a casino where the capital funds are the house and take a huge payday. You can win, or lose, but th
The Problem of Labor (Score:3)
Consider that automation could eliminate a great many jobs, leaving only a market for people who can teach the automation new things or do jobs that automation is simply not suited for because they have a "human" element which is essential to them. Consider that this might really eliminate the jobs that are all that 50% of people are capable of for good.
This gives us two choices: provide a basic income, or let all of those people starve and die.
There is going to be a very strong political force on the "starve and die" side. Not that I like it. I bet there are lots of people right here on Slashdot who would argue for it.
Marc Andreessen (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it weird that Marc is described simply as a "Silicon Valley investor", like he's just one of innumerable rich people interested in tech, instead of describing him as the founder of Netscape, who first brought web browsers to the masses, which seems like the much bigger deal if you're going to say who he is and why anyone should care about his opinions.
Linear thoughts (Score:2)
There's an America outside Silicon Valley (Score:3)
"The jobs crisis we have in the U.S. is that we don't have enough workers,"
Oh, bullshit. The jobs crisis you have in the Bay Area tech bubble may be that you don't have enough workers (who are under 30, with Stanford CS degrees, and don't mind 95 hour work weeks and living 8 to an apartment), but the jobs crisis the rest of the country has is that the market wage for someone who graduated from high school 20-30 years ago and didn't finish college or reach master status in a trade is rapidly approaching zero.
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Technology doesn't stand still.
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Re: Jobs (Score:2)
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