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from the how-many-robots-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb dept.
Digital technology has been a fantastic creator of economic wealth, particularly in the twenty years since the Internet and World Wide Web were unveiled to the masses. And with non-trivial applications of artificial intelligence (such as Apple's Siri) finally reaching the mainstream consumer market, one is tempted to agree with pundits asserting that the Second Machine Age is just getting underway.
But Yale ethicist Wendell Wallach argues that growth in wealth has been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise in income inequality; for example, stock ownership is now concentrated in the hands of a relative few (though greater than 1 percent). The increase in GDP has not led to an increase in wages, nor in median inflation-adjusted income. Furthermore, Wallach says technology is a leading cause of this shift, as it displaces workers in occupation after occupation more quickly than new career opportunities arise.
This piece led to the latest iteration of the 'will robots take all of our jobs' debate, this time on Business Insider, with Jim Edwards arguing that the jobs lost tended to be of the mindless and repetitive variety, while the increase in productive capacity has led to the creation of many new positions. This repeated earlier cycles of the industrial revolution and will be accelerated in the decades ahead. Edwards illustrated his point with a chart of UK unemployment with a trend line (note: drawn by Edwards) in a pronounced downward direction over the past 30 years. John Tamny made a similar point in Forbes last month.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 08 2015, @02:57PM
Some minor corrections
* Land - once its polluted, its not as useful for growing. And topsoil is a more or less non-renewable (on human time scales) resource, and once its gone...
* Raw materials - The stuff thats cheapest / lowest energy to extract gets extracted first. That means the energy cost for materials always increases over time. Which is OK in an era of generally increasing energy. In an era of declining energy per capita, not so good. Even worse when your source of energy itself is a raw extractable material and we already extracted and burned the easy to get stuff.
* Labor - Nowadays it needs to be vocationally trained, not educated, (nobody has a use for philosophy majors anymore other than as waiters and bartenders) and we've got vaguely around twice as many people as the economy needs, and that "twice" is growing. That means either the economy has to grow (LOL that hasn't happened since the 70s) or you need redistribution by the red squads and guillotine (we like to pretend this won't happen, just like every other human in every culture right up until it did happen) or you need people to get used to grinding poverty aka let them eat cake and they should pull themselves up from their bootstraps like job creators do. There are various mixtures of course, and the exact mixture varies over time. All of it pretty much sucks. On the bright side there's always plagues and that could keep the great game playing along for a little while longer, best get used to that idea.
* Infrastructure - All infrastructure has an "economy must be this tall" kind of gatekeeper. Look at Detroit. Once you collapse far enough, its no longer possible to maintain infrastructure, which leads to further infrastructure decline which leads to further economic collapse. If you look at it like a disease, inevitably, if you can't fix a growing cancer, it eventually consumes everything. We can't fix Detroit even at the peak of energy and wealth. On the downslope it seems even less likely. So no matter where you live in the future, eventually, it'll be "Welcome to Detroit!" time.
* Water - see raw materials. I live in a river community. 200 years ago you could drink the river water, today that would not be wise. We have no shortage of water being east of the mississippi, however I hope you like decades of pulp mill waste and chromium plating compounds. Lets just say there aren't any fish living in the river, not any that you'd want to eat. At enormous energy cost you could clean up the river and/or the water in the river, oh wait we're not going to have that energy, and back when we had money and energy we had no interest in cleaning it up, so it ain't happening. Locally we drink muni well water, at least until the aquifer empties. Its dropped about 100 feet in my lifetime, what me worry?
The future is already here, its just very unevenly distributed. America 2050 generally looks a hell of a lot more like 2015 Detroit or Buffalo than 2015 Manhattan or Vegas. Just look at it almost like a thermodynamics entropy argument... is it more likely that your hometown can slide into Baltimore or slide into silicon valley, times every hometown in the country.
Note that rolling back the metrics for resources etc sound good on a raw count. Going back to 1977 for number of full time "real" jobs, OK the 70s were pretty awesome. Going back to 1940 level of on shore crude oil extraction, OK 1940 was cool according to my grandparents aside from the whole "here comes hitler" obviousness. So we can roll back to the good old days. Oh except for that population growth problem... And what happens when we roll back to 1800, or further? Going back to "plantation culture" in the south is going to be a tough sell, but its gotta happen eventually, no matter how much disliked.
"Yeah, well, they screwed it up in the old days, but maybe we won't screw it up this time" - said absolutely everyone who ever screwed anything up historically.
I'm feeling rather optimistic, we'll get thru without a WW3 or nuke war or biological war. Pessimistic me would be claiming that's inevitable. It probably is, realistically.
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Tuesday June 09 2015, @02:55AM
When we finally have the impetus to get off this rock we will no longer have the resources to do so.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2015, @06:51PM
Those aren't the only possible solutions. "Redistribution" only has to occur at gunpoint when inequality has grown so large that the system breaks and it happens spontaneously. Things like cooperatives (you know, socialism) prevent the need for redistribution by helping to keep inequality from growing in the first place, though I'm not sure it'll help reduce already-established inequality, or do so fast enough to prevent the collapse of the system.
We already know everything we need to, we know all the consequences and we know the solutions, all we need to do is actually do something instead of watching things go to shit yet again.