So what do we do when when nobody has a job?

[Ben Kenobi]

Like anything, it's OK when it benefits him, and the worst thing ever when it doesn't.

Why would I want to deny others the same opportunities that I have? I'm thankful to have a chance to live here in Texas. I see no reason why legal immigration from Mexico (and elsewhere) should be discouraged.

Please, find a post where I advocate restrictions on legal immigration, before I came to Texas. I've always believed that legal immigration is a net benefit to the United States.

[molly bloom]

Yes, and? Argenchileans are racist against Mexicans?

Why do you think I'd be opposed to legal immigration from Mexico?

Because of your oft-expressed racism ?

[The Mad Monk]

...and now a word from the Left:

Op-Ed Columnist
Sympathy for the Luddites
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 13, 2013 1249 Comments

¶ In 1786, the cloth workers of Leeds, a wool-industry center in northern England, issued a protest against the growing use of “scribbling” machines, which were taking over a task formerly performed by skilled labor. “How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?” asked the petitioners. “And what are they to put their children apprentice to?”

¶ Those weren’t foolish questions. Mechanization eventually — that is, after a couple of generations — led to a broad rise in British living standards. But it’s far from clear whether typical workers reaped any benefits during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution; many workers were clearly hurt. And often the workers hurt most were those who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills — only to find those skills suddenly devalued.

¶ So are we living in another such era? And, if we are, what are we going to do about it?

¶ Until recently, the conventional wisdom about the effects of technology on workers was, in a way, comforting. Clearly, many workers weren’t sharing fully — or, in many cases, at all — in the benefits of rising productivity; instead, the bulk of the gains were going to a minority of the work force. But this, the story went, was because modern technology was raising the demand for highly educated workers while reducing the demand for less educated workers. And the solution was more education.

¶ Now, there were always problems with this story. Notably, while it could account for a rising gap in wages between those with college degrees and those without, it couldn’t explain why a small group — the famous “one percent” — was experiencing much bigger gains than highly educated workers in general. Still, there may have been something to this story a decade ago.

¶ Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.

¶ I’ve noted before that the nature of rising inequality in America changed around 2000. Until then, it was all about worker versus worker; the distribution of income between labor and capital — between wages and profits, if you like — had been stable for decades. Since then, however, labor’s share of the pie has fallen sharply. As it turns out, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. A new report from the International Labor Organization points out that the same thing has been happening in many other countries, which is what you’d expect to see if global technological trends were turning against workers.

¶ And some of those turns may well be sudden. The McKinsey Global Institute recently released a report on a dozen major new technologies that it considers likely to be “disruptive,” upsetting existing market and social arrangements. Even a quick scan of the report’s list suggests that some of the victims of disruption will be workers who are currently considered highly skilled, and who invested a lot of time and money in acquiring those skills. For example, the report suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot of “automation of knowledge work,” with software doing things that used to require college graduates. Advanced robotics could further diminish employment in manufacturing, but it could also replace some medical professionals.

¶ So should workers simply be prepared to acquire new skills? The woolworkers of 18th-century Leeds addressed this issue back in 1786: “Who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task” of learning a new trade? Also, they asked, what will happen if the new trade, in turn, gets devalued by further technological advance?

¶ And the modern counterparts of those woolworkers might well ask further, what will happen to us if, like so many students, we go deep into debt to acquire the skills we’re told we need, only to learn that the economy no longer wants those skills?

¶ Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).

¶ So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.

¶ I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/op...s.html?_r=1&#h[IcaBwe]

[The Mad Monk]

...meanwhile, back in the capitalist highlands...

If 'Humans Need Not Apply,' Will All Our Jobs Disappear?

I just watched Humans Need Not Apply, the latest video from CGP Grey, the semi-anonymous creator with dozens of explanatory videos to his credit.

This sobering 15-minute piece suggests, in a convincing fashion, that many human jobs will disappear over the coming years, because automation – basically computers and robots – will do them faster, better and cheaper.

From writers (gasp!) to programmers, physicians to researchers, profession after profession will be whittled away by machines that a.) Learn on their own, and b.) Are cheaper to operate than you are.

I’m writing about this today not because I understand the topic in great depth, but instead because I DON’T understand the topic in depth.

We have not studied the implications of technological change. Instead, we are blindly going down a road without the faintest understanding of where it leads. It is plausible that we are destroying our own future.

humans need not apply

Back in 2001, I authored a book called “Making It Personal: How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy”. My objective was to frame the debate between personalization and privacy, so that we could collectively develop an intelligent balance between the two. Just weeks after the book came out, 9/11 happened and no one cared about privacy anymore. So much for an intelligent balance.

Since that time, entrepreneurial forces have reasserted themselves. In industry after industry, well-meaning entrepreneurs are attacking problems that used to occupy human workers. Humans Need Not Apply specifically mentions how computers are replacing people in the legal discovery space; I know an entrepreneurial team that is implementing such a solution.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s happening: humans can make money replacing humans with computers… but the number of humans who profit from this is a tiny fraction of the number of humans who lose their jobs because of this.

So what’s the answer? I have no idea.

Population is growing to unprecedented levels; last week a UNICEF report predicted that by the end of this century the population of Africa alone will hit four billion people. What are all these people going to do?

Before you attempt to answer, watch Humans Need Not Apply.

In “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies,” authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that:

There’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education, because these people can use technology to create and capture value. However, there’s never been a worse time to be a worker with only ‘ordinary’ skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary pace.

Here’s what I know for sure: each of us is competing against commoditization. I don’t just mean each company or each industry. I mean each person. You. Me. Our roles are being commoditized, and commoditized roles will eventually be automated, because they must be done as cheaply as possible.

If you want to keep your job and preserve your lifestyle, you must specialize. You must be able to do two things well:

1. Leverage computers in a uniquely human manner.

2. Specialize in tasks that computers have difficulty doing on their own.

If you do things the way people did them 15 years ago, you are toast. If any smart person can do your job with a few months of training, you are toast.

Specialize. Pass the word to anyone you love or even like a little.

Bruce Kasanoff ghostwrites (and edits) articles for entrepreneurs.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucekasanoff/2014/08/18/if-humans-need-not-apply-will-all-our-jobs-disappear/

[C0ckney]

krugman is hardly from the left (that's a bit like calling keynes 'left') and what he proposes is merely giving the poor enough crumbs from the table to stop them from cutting the throats of the rich. this is perhaps not a bad solution; it's certainly more humane to keep people in reasonable comfort and plenty, than to put them in a position where they are forced to take drastic action or starve. it's also interesting to note that in the current political climate, we are seeing the opposite happening, low skill workers becoming more insecure and poorly paid, while at same time social safety nets are under attack.

[Ben Kenobi]

Population is growing to unprecedented levels; last week a UNICEF report predicted that by the end of this century the population of Africa alone will hit four billion people. What are all these people going to do?

Ugh. Do we have to continue dealing with Mathusian claptrap?

His argument assumes that food production and food demand are independent variables. They are not. As demand for food increases the price of food will increase. This will shift the benefit of technology that can lower the price.

[Ben Kenobi]

it's certainly more humane to keep people in reasonable comfort and plenty

So rather than having to slit throats, it's ok to rob them anyways? We don't have the money to sustain 'reasonable comfort'. If you want reasonable comfort, you should work.

[The Mad Monk]

If we have automation to the degree suggested, we may very well have the money. Of course, the path you take to that point will be painful no matter which way you go.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Employment is a social choice, if decided by the government everyone could have full employment. What would they do? There are always more infrastructure projects to do, which would not be a total waste of resources paid for through the government, either in today's or in some future more automated society.

Theoretically you could have a workforce made from unemployed in the private sector, which would get deployed on projects picked by the voters ( direct democracy ), that would keep us all busy forever and at the country at full employment if the people wanted so.

[C0ckney]

Theoretically you could have a workforce made from unemployed in the private sector, which would get deployed on projects picked by the voters ( direct democracy ), that would keep us all busy forever and at the country at full employment if the people wanted so.

you know it's not too long a journey from this to social control of resources and the abolishion of the the middleman (the state).

[Sava]

Freedom can't exist if you need to spend your days at a job... unless you like your job and would do it for free

[KrazyHorse]

What utter nonsense..."if you have any obligations at all then you're not free".

[The Mad Monk]

Employment is a social choice, if decided by the government everyone could have full employment. What would they do? There are always more infrastructure projects to do, which would not be a total waste of resources paid for through the government, either in today's or in some future more automated society.

Theoretically you could have a workforce made from unemployed in the private sector, which would get deployed on projects picked by the voters ( direct democracy ), that would keep us all busy forever and at the country at full employment if the people wanted so.

Not at all. There is no need to control the unemployed, beyond the normal criminal enforcement.

If a significant portion of the population is unable to work, that is, earn an income, personal income tax, and everything hanging on it, falls apart.

It's a perfect scenario for a flat tax (personal and corporate, with the greater share taken by increasingly automated corporations), coupled to a Basic Income.

Welfare, Unemployment, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, all that goes by the boards in favor of one universal, unified check.

How big of a government do you need for that?

...unless you really do want to control them.

[The Mad Monk]

SO!

For those who have actually watched the video, what did you think of the driverless mining equipment?

[Sava]

Obligations = slavery