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Good news! Automation capable of erasing white collar jobs is coming, but not for a decade or more. And that’s also the bad news because interest in automation accelerates during economic downturns, so once tech that can take your job arrives you’ll already have lived through another period of economic turmoil that may already have cost you your job.
That lovely scenario was advanced yesterday by professor Mirko Draca of The London School of Economics, who yesterday told Huawei’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Innovation Day 2018 that the world is currently in “an era of investment and experimentation” with technology. The effects of such eras, he said, generally emerge ten to fifteen years in the future.
Innovation in the 1980s therefore sparked the PC and internet booms of the mid-to-late 1990s, and we’re still surfing [SIC - suffering?] the changes they unleashed. “Our current era of mobile tech doesn’t measure up to the radical 1990s,” he said, as shown by the fact that productivity gains appear to have stalled for a decade or more.
[...] “We predict that AI and robotics will lead to some sort of productivity surge in ten to fifteen years,” he said, adding that there is “no clear evidence” that a new wave of technologies that threaten jobs has started.
But he also said that it will once businesses see the need to control costs.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @08:55PM (6 children)
And my obvious rebuttal here is that the responsible people are negative feedback to that boom/bust cycle.
Unless, of course, your characterization of it is completely wrong. Then it won't.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 11 2018, @09:16PM (3 children)
In what way? They still get unemployed, they still seek jobs when they're put out of work. If they're independently wealthy and don't need jobs, then, sure, those people are "the solution" to all economic problems, aren't they?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @10:52PM (2 children)
Come on, it's not hard to figure this out. You already implied that boom/bust cycles happen because in the "boom" people seek out too much risk, and then in a "bust", they seek out too little. This group runs counter to that and hence, is negative feedback.
And I already pointed out that I don't believe that responsible people are "the solution" to every problem. So it's a waste of time, yours and mine, to lecture me about that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 12 2018, @12:28AM (1 child)
Equating independently wealthy with responsible is your perspective, not mine.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @03:55AM
Sorry, didn't happen.
Let's instead talk about a scenario. A common bit of advice is that when you start to save money, first save about half a year's salary in something liquid like a savings account. Sometimes this is called "fuck you money" because it's enough of a cushion that you can abruptly leave a job under normal circumstances and still have a very good chance of finding another job before you start hurting for cash. So let's say that Mr. Responsible and Mr. Grasshopper both work at a company (suppose they're the sole breadwinners in their families). Mr. Responsible has the fuck you money and Mr. Grasshopper, well is just barely getting by.
If they both lose their jobs during a normal "boom" period, Mr. Responsible eventually finds another job without much drama. Mr. Grasshopper has some tribulation, a lot of stress, and ends up entering his new job with some significant credit card debt, but otherwise still going.
During extended economic downturns, whatever bad things happen to Mr. Responsible will happen to Mr. Grasshopper at least six months earlier. So that fuck you money, even if it isn't enough to keep Mr. Responsible afloat, it will at least keep him from being a problem for society for half a year. As I mentioned earlier, that's how financial responsibility can help with societal problems even at the most elementary of levels of responsibility.
Now suppose Mr. Responsible had invested a significant portion of his lifetime savings, say several years worth after the inevitable declines in the stock markets. He's still not independently wealthy - an extended period of unemployment will eat those investments. But he has choices that Mr. Grasshopper doesn't. Mr. Responsible can go back to school at the local college and keep his house, for example. He can move somewhere else in the country and still afford to rent a place for a few years. He can start a small business. This is risk taking that Mr. Grasshopper will have great difficulty to achieve. In other words, Mr. Responsible can afford to take more risks than Mr. Grasshopper can.
So here's how responsibility well below the level of "independently wealthy" can serve as negative feedback for a boom/bust cycle. During the boom phase, Mr. Responsible held back and saved/invested money rather than just spend it. This lessens the extent of the "boom" phase because he's not contributing as much to the high risk economic activity driving the boom. Then when the bust phase happens, Mr. Responsible is better positioned to take mild risks that can significantly improve his long term economic health. He's not going to suddenly become a compulsive gambler, but in the extreme risk adverse phase of a substantial recession, even modest risk taking can have significant mitigative effects. The combination of the two is the negative feedback of which I speak and which doesn't require one to be independently wealthy.
My view is that it is a bad idea to attempt to eliminate boom/bust cycles altogether. In fact, I believe the last few busts have been made significantly worse because some governments were trying to extend the period of the boom phase (at least encouraging higher GDP growth) without actually providing any credible economic benefit to back up their efforts. But with a more financially competent and responsible public, the extremes of booms and busts would be greatly reduced at no cost to society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @09:32PM (1 child)
I think the obvious rebuttal is that if the working class organized within a libertarian political system, the working class could demand a sufficient share of the wealth to act as the cyclical dampener you're suggesting. This would probably be a better and more scalable solution than using the political system as a means for working class organization. As wswswswswsws would suggest, this could be achieved by rank-and-file committees working in decentralized cooperation throughout the entire economic. The goal would be economic socialism (the ownership of the means of production by the workers) within political libertarianism (small laissez faire government).
In fact, this is likely unavoidable as service jobs become automated away by things like self-checkouts, order kiosks at fast food places, and burger flipping robots.
Where my supposed scalability runs into trouble is when the average human is no longer capable of performing work for economic gain. The working class would need to become a stock ownership class for full scalability. Therefore, the utopian dream may be a working class that is also the ownership class. This may be where strict political libertarianism runs into problems. But then I'd suggest some kind of citizen's dividend where every person is a vested owner of capital (company shares) from the age of majority as the implementation for a UBI. Devil will be in the details as always.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @10:53AM
Socialism implemented inside libertariansim is an interesting idea. Free people organize unions, guilds, trade groups, community governments, and associate or disassociate at will. The groups act in the collective interest of the members and survive or fail based on participation and resources invested by members. It would be chaotic at times, but also self-regulating.