The Future of Work in America

[MachineGhost]

Technology and the Web are destroying far more jobs than they create. We will need to develop a "Third Way" based on community rather than the Market or the State to adapt to this reality.

http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-da ... ork-2012-9

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[Gumby]

Last year, I told you guys, the robots were out to destroy us. Their master plan has only just begun.

[Bean]

Last year, I told you guys, the robots were out to destroy us. Their master plan has only just begun.

The reason we do not see them is because they are ninja robots

[Pointedstick]

This subject fascinates me. I work at a big tech company doing engineering work for smartphones, with a side business producing and selling parts for automation machines (3D printers). I count myself extremely fortunate to be among those who have profited immensely from the move toward highly engineered consumer products, advanced robotics, and manufacturing automation. You know, the whole "rise of the nerds" thing. By all accounts, I have won the cosmic lottery.

And yet…

I find myself afflicted with this oddly Marxist feeling of alienation from my labor, sitting and punching keys on the computer all day and staring into a terminal window. There's creativity and craftsmanship involved, but I'm disconnected and distant from the end product, and I feel like I'm not building anything that will last. My team toils endless hours to produce amazing products that we then rush to make obsolete a year later. It's a pace that's as exhausting for us as it is for consumers who want to "keep up", a very difficult and expensive challenge. In 15 years, will anyone remember what I built with anything other than faint nostalgia?

In this fascinating old thread, Gumby posted this:

In Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague," resources and luxuries are so common, that the poor must bear the burden of consuming and disposing of the bounty, as well as working at meaningless jobs to produce more meaningless plenty; the rich, conversely, are allowed to live simple but comfortable lifestyles.

I've been interested in the EarlyRetirementExtreme philosophy and I saw it eerily reflected in this quotation. If I can own a home debt-free and accumulate $600,000, then I can comfortably live off the interest, dividends, and relatively consistent yearly capital accumulation (thank you PP!). As in the short story--which admittedly I have not yet read--I feel the need to be rich before I can live the simple, humble life I crave. Meanwhile, technological progress has enabled poor people to live the high consumption lifestyle of previous generations' upper class, but have no money left over for savings, so they're stuck doing it for the rest of their lives, helping to create the demand that people like me earn high salaries meeting.

All of this is voluntary, of course. Nobody forces me to work at my cushy though psychologically unsatisfying job producing disposable consumer products, just as nobody forces poor people to buy cars, cable TV subscriptions, and engineered food-like products. But there's something about a society that makes both of these extremes easy for people to slip into that nags at me, making me feel like we've somehow lost our way by delegating increasing portions of our lives to high-salary faraway experts who we pay with money we earn just-in-time by selling our labor that's either diminishing in value or increasing in distance from the end product.

[stone]

I think the idea, that technology is behind inequality, is a very pernicious smoke screen of BS. I think the inequality is simply the output of the "natural" progression of financialization, accumulation of  debt and wealth etc. It is financial engineers behind it not electronic engineers. Pretty much every financial inovation invented has been a device for extending inequality.

[Storm]

I don't necessarily think that robots and automation are a bad thing.  Automation has made it so that where our ancestors spent 80% of their waking time growing, preserving, or preparing food, we now spend only 5-10% of our time doing the same thing.

What it does mean is that it's not as lucrative to be an individual laborer on a farm any more.

In short, the answer isn't to kill automation or robots.  The answer is to teach more people how to program and repair robots, so that even more things can be automated.  In a couple hundred years from now we might find ourselves living in a Star Trek type society where the vast majority of us can spend our lives pursuing whatever we want without needing to worry about food or resources.

[Gumby]

In a couple hundred years from now we might find ourselves living in a Star Trek type society where the vast majority of us can spend our lives pursuing whatever we want without needing to worry about food or resources.

It's called post-scarcity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

The only question is whether it will be a utopia or a dystopia.

[craigr]

In a couple hundred years from now we might find ourselves living in a Star Trek type society where the vast majority of us can spend our lives pursuing whatever we want without needing to worry about food or resources.

It's called post-scarcity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

The only question is whether it will be a utopia or a dystopia.

I vote dystopia. I still remember this story book from when I was a child:


http://www.amazon.com/Lazy-Tommy-Pumpki ... 0060217502

[dualstow]

From Hans Moravec's nonfiction book, Robot, I've thought a lot about the utopian fork in the road. I'd forgotten all about Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead!
I've also enjoyed a few books at that post-scarcity wiki link, like 'The Diamond Age' (Neal Stephenson) and 'Singularity Sky' (Stross).

As they say, you can't stop progress. 

[Lone Wolf]

In short, the answer isn't to kill automation or robots.  The answer is to teach more people how to program and repair robots, so that even more things can be automated.  In a couple hundred years from now we might find ourselves living in a Star Trek type society where the vast majority of us can spend our lives pursuing whatever we want without needing to worry about food or resources.

Exactly right.  What else could one ask out of life?  None of us work in order to just "have a job".  The job is a means to an end.  That end is usually survival, financial security, and providing for our families.  The job itself isn't what gives life meaning.  That part is up to us.

And as far as jobs go, it's a mistake to confuse "structural employment" with "permanent employment".  Jobs for cobblers and buggy whip designers have long since been destroyed.

I acknowledge that there will likely come a day when there's nothing a man can do that a machine cannot (including think.)  But there's no need to take such a static view of this process as it unfolds.  Over the decades ahead, I think that we'll find ourselves merging more and more with our machines as they become part of our lives and eventually even our bodies.

Is there anyone that can honestly say that Google and the internet aren't a crucial part of how they do their thinking, research and analysis now?  Imagine when the interfaces between human and computer are more direct, less clumsy, and millions of times more powerful than the simple internet of today.