The Boy Who Cried Robot: A World Without Work

[jimmy olsen]

That was a lot of words to say "they're not going to be put back to work".

Even vastly more words to say nothing of the kind. 

He said retail is dead and a manufacturing boom won't put them back to work.

He does allow that an infrastructure boom would put people to work, but this congress isn't going to pass an infrastructure bill. And even if it did 60% of the workers at risk are women, and I'm sure some decent portion of the men are over 35 or simply not fit to enter the construction workforce, so most of the people hired to do that work will be from outside the group we're talking about.

[Monoriu]

That was a lot of words to say "they're not going to be put back to work".

Even vastly more words to say nothing of the kind. 

He said retail is dead and a manufacturing boom won't put them back to work.

He does allow that an infrastructure boom would put people to work, but this congress isn't going to pass an infrastructure bill. And even if it did 60% of the workers at risk are women, and I'm sure some decent portion of the men are over 35 or simply not fit to enter the construction workforce, so most of the people hired to do that work will be from outside the group we're talking about.

Then you are also saying they won't be put back to work?

[jimmy olsen]

That was a lot of words to say "they're not going to be put back to work".

Even vastly more words to say nothing of the kind. 

He said retail is dead and a manufacturing boom won't put them back to work.

He does allow that an infrastructure boom would put people to work, but this congress isn't going to pass an infrastructure bill. And even if it did 60% of the workers at risk are women, and I'm sure some decent portion of the men are over 35 or simply not fit to enter the construction workforce, so most of the people hired to do that work will be from outside the group we're talking about.

Then you are also saying they won't be put back to work?

That was my point from the beginning. I'm also saying that Minsky used a lot of words to talk around that point, but really ended up saying the same thing.

DGuller is disagreeing with my interpretation.

[Berkut]

That was a lot of words to say "they're not going to be put back to work".

Even vastly more words to say nothing of the kind. 

He said retail is dead and a manufacturing boom won't put them back to work.

He does allow that an infrastructure boom would put people to work, but this congress isn't going to pass an infrastructure bill. And even if it did 60% of the workers at risk are women, and I'm sure some decent portion of the men are over 35 or simply not fit to enter the construction workforce, so most of the people hired to do that work will be from outside the group we're talking about.

More to the point that an infrastructure bill, no matter how well implemented, is not going to come anywhere close to replacing millions of jobs lost to the decline in retail stores.

In that the US has not done maintained our infrastructure properly, that represents a pool of non-renewable labor needs that will be consumed once we get back to where we ought to be, and then will be gone. Some slight increase in employment if we then decide to actually maintain our infrastructure properly, but it still doesn't represent a significant permanent increase in the need for human labor.

And construction itself is incredibly vulnerable to automation as well. It takes a fraction of the human workers to build things that is used to....


It's all going to be fine though, all those people working at Borders and Wal-Mart can just get jobs programming robots.

[Zanza]

You have more of the famous job creators in the cabinet than ever before, so it can only be a question of time until jobs trickle down to those former retail workers thanks to generous tax cuts for other job creators. 

[Berkut]

As one of the guys with a job "programming robots" it is a pretty damn good job to have.

But I have zero illusions that any significant portion of the labor pool can do it, or that my job programming robots (more generally and accurately to say that my job is around increasing human efficiency through effective technology tools, but it amounts to the same thing) isn't *itself* vulnerable to being optimized away in turn.

The "good" jobs to have in the IT world are good precisely because they, at their most basic level, are mostly about creating tools that make more, sometimes *radically* more, efficient use of human labor. Writing software is mostly about coming up with some way to lay someone else off, in many ways.

Not all of course - it is also about coming up with ways to do things that may not have been possible before, of course. That *sometimes* can create new jobs, but that is a tiny fraction of most of the work being done in the technology fields. Mostly it is about creating better tools, with "better" often being directly defined as saving human labour, or having that is an indirect result.

[Berkut]

I think the development in technology tools itself is this very cool mix of allowing more and more people the ability to do technology jobs, while at the same time making less people actually needed to do them. Example - the development of highly abstracted programming languages has radically increased the pool of people with the basic needed intelligence and analytical ability to write software. Writing JAVA is MUCH easier than C, which was much easier than assembler, which was much easier than binary, or whatever.

Now we have software development kits that allow people to write pretty great Apps that don't really require much ability to code at all. We have web site design tools that allow people to create sophisticated websites with no need to really know HTML, much less have understanding of IP protocols.

So there is the radically larger pool of people who can do a lot of the work, but at the same time, this means there is much, much less work that needs to be done. You don't need a team of highly trained software engineers to put out the next great app in many cases, because the tools have gotten so good.

This, I think (and i mean that honestly since I am not really very sure...) means that there is more and more concentration of truly useful technology skills into smaller hands - the people with the skills and aptitude to make the next great tool, while at the same time lowering the bar for those same skills.

I think this is a good thing - it seems like it ought to be, since I can imagine people out there with great design ideas and innovation who lack the technical skills to realize them being able to do so now whereas maybe before they could not.

But it also certainly seems like another area where there is less overall need for just raw human labor hours.

[CountDeMoney]

It's all going to be fine though, all those people working at Borders and Wal-Mart can just get jobs programming robots.

If the dumbasses can't find the "Computer Programming" section next to "Self-Help", that's their own damned fault.

[The Brain]

Everyone working at Borders will be fine.

[alfred russel]

It's all going to be fine though, all those people working at Borders and Wal-Mart can just get jobs programming robots.

The price of hand jobs is going to plummet.

[The Minsky Moment]

That was a lot of words to say "they're not going to be put back to work".

The problem Jimmy is that the statistics don't support the story.  The malls and big chain retailers have been taking bad hits but overall employment levels in retail have held up.  Stock clerks and order fillers in particular are still growing and are projected to grow into the next decade, as "back store" functions take on more importance.

Cashiers are going to take a hit.  If you look at the BLS data you can see where employment growth is and is going to be over the next decade for unskilled workers: food prep and various categories of health and personal aides.  Maybe construction.  Jobs will be there but they might not be very good ones. 

[DGuller]

In any case, asking Minsky to figure out where the new jobs will be coming from is kind of bullshit.  That's like asking me which houses will burn down next year.  I don't know, but I know some of them will burn down.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the theory Minsky subscribes to will continue to work.  For all we know, the last couple of centuries, which is a relatively short time period in human history, were a short-term phenomenon and a result of lucky confluence of several factors, and in the long run there is no guarantee that creative destruction will continue to be the force for good.  But even when that theory was true in hindsight, literate economists at the time still would be hard-pressed to accurately predict where new jobs would be coming from.

[mongers]

Wait, Berkut is programmed by robots, that explains a lot. 

[Jacob]

Everyone working at Borders will be fine.

Yeah, aren't they hiring a bunch of people to patrol the border right now?

[Admiral Yi]

The jobs will come as long as there are not impediments to the market clearing.  Whether we will be happy with the pay is another question.