Postcapitalism and the Impending Death of Work

[TrueMetis]

18 minutes ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

You are correct, but most advances in AI tech that have made people really start freak out about these things have only come in the last 2-3 years or so. They haven't had time to get implemented on a large scale yet. 

Ditto with solar power, batteries, etc. Huge changes in price levels and performance compared to only a few years ago. Fossil fuels basically don't have a future any longer. 

The viability of solar is something I'm really happy to have been proven wrong about.

[Fez]

I think we're a lot further away from massive changes in society than this thread posits. I agree that there are some sectors that are going to start getting eliminated due to automation. But I think there are enough where either labor is cheap enough or the demand for human workers is high enough*, that the system will continue much as it currently is; albeit with even more have-nots than there currently are. Maybe that eventually comes crashing down and we end up in a Children of Men-style dystopia (just without the inability to reproduce) or maybe we eventually we reach the degree of automation being described in the OP; but I don't think we get any significant changes in our lifetime.

*For instance, people bring up lawyers a lot as an example of the kind of wide-spread white collar job that is going to get automated and help lead to the changes being described here. I don't think most lawyers will get replaced by automation. I think a lot of paralegals and administrative staff will get replaced by automation, but not lawyers themselves. Most lawyers have jobs that require mediation skills (divorce, child custody, law guardian), negotiating skills (everything), and arguing skills (anything that goes trial); skills which are not easily replaced by automation. And even if automation could replace, I think most people wouldn't be comfortable with it and that courts would stick with tradition and demand human lawyers. The only aspect easily automated is legal research, and that's mostly paralegals.

[Werthead]

 

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I basically said my piece in the thread that inspired this thread, but I'll repeat the basic jist of it. We'll know when the robots are really coming for our jobs - not just individual sectors and jobs being replaced as in the past, but systemic job loss from automation - when we start seeing a combination of both high and rising productivity and unemployment. Right now we don't see either in the US or UK, and I'm pretty sure (although feel free to check me on this) that it's not being seen in any of the other OECD countries.

 

This is already happening and some lengths are being gone to by governments unwilling to deal with it to cover it up. In the UK, the job market is showing the first signs of future systemic collapse. Full-time, permanent jobs for everyone is basically already dead as an idea. More and more jobs are short-term, temporary or part of the "gig economy". Long-term, permanent jobs are increasingly thin on the ground. Already the retail sector, which 20+ years ago was a sure provision of employment for the low-skilled, has effectively collapsed thanks to the advent of the Internet. Unless you go into management, permanent and full-time jobs in that sector are gone, completely. That is now transferring into the service, restaurant and banking sectors.

The UK government is dealing with this by fudging the figures to hide the problem of underemployment. If they took the total number of working hours and distributed them as if they were full-time jobs, the number of unemployed people in the country would increase dramatically (the highest count is to about 15 million, but more sensible figures are around 7 million, or about four times what the current "total unemployment" figures show).

The fudging is quite blatant and easily observable (as income continues to fall, dramatically, despite us being in alleged full employment, which if that was true would start pushing wages up), but because the British government knows it will not get any pushback from the media (who fear confusing their audience, whom they assume are simpletons), they simply repeat the lie unopposed.

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Another possibility is that the resources necessary to sustain this technology start to run out, eventually leading to technological regression.

Potentially, although I don't think we're anywhere near that point as yet. Energy production used to be a concern as the main limiting factor but as we crest the wave of renewables that will stop being a problem. Food production for the population may end up being a far bigger issue.

Quote

 

I think we're a lot further away from massive changes in society than this thread posits. I agree that there are some sectors that are going to start getting eliminated due to automation. But I think there are enough where either labor is cheap enough or the demand for human workers is high enough*, that the system will continue much as it currently is; albeit with even more have-nots than there currently are. Maybe that eventually comes crashing down and we end up in a Children of Men-style dystopia (just without the inability to reproduce) or maybe we eventually we reach the degree of automation being described in the OP; but I don't think we get any significant changes in our lifetime.

 

The overwhelming evidence so far is that we are actually dramatically underestimating the time these things can change in and how dramatically technology can change things. In 1997, just twenty years ago, virtually no-one owned a mobile phone or DVD player and only a relatively tiny minority were connected to the Internet. If you told someone then that in just 20 years retail as we know it would change irrevocably, that almost everyone would be carrying a powerful, always-connected computer in their pocket at all times with which they can access any movie or song ever recorded at will, and that you'd be able to check up on how badly the bully from school's life was going whenever you wanted, they'd think you were mad.

I think that the scale of the issue will become clear when self-driving cars suddenly go from being nowhere to being everywhere, and that will happen almost overnight (like how quickly mobile phones became ubiquitous) because the corporate interests behind them are so ruthelessly determined to get rid of expensive human components (especially after Uber lost a whole series of legal cases) and they are pouring so much money into the field. Millions of people in the UK and US (tens or hundreds of millions worldwide) will lose their jobs overnight and, as these jobs are appealing to the low-skilled, they may not have many other options for jobs.

[Fez]

16 minutes ago, Werthead said:

 

 

This is already happening and some lengths are being gone to by governments unwilling to deal with it to cover it up. In the UK, the job market is showing the first signs of future systemic collapse. Full-time, permanent jobs for everyone is basically already dead as an idea. More and more jobs are short-term, temporary or part of the "gig economy". Long-term, permanent jobs are increasingly thin on the ground. Already the retail sector, which 20+ years ago was a sure provision of employment for the low-skilled, has effectively collapsed thanks to the advent of the Internet. Unless you go into management, permanent and full-time jobs in that sector are gone, completely. That is now transferring into the service, restaurant and banking sectors.

The UK government is dealing with this by fudging the figures to hide the problem of underemployment. If they took the total number of working hours and distributed them as if they were full-time jobs, the number of unemployed people in the country would increase dramatically (the highest count is to about 15 million, but more sensible figures are around 7 million, or about four times what the current "total unemployment" figures show).

The fudging is quite blatant and easily observable (as income continues to fall, dramatically, despite us being in alleged full employment, which if that was true would start pushing wages up), but because the British government knows it will not get any pushback from the media (who fear confusing their audience, whom they assume are simpletons), they simply repeat the lie unopposed.

Potentially, although I don't think we're anywhere near that point as yet. Energy production used to be a concern as the main limiting factor but as we crest the wave of renewables that will stop being a problem. Food production for the population may end up being a far bigger issue.

The overwhelming evidence so far is that we are actually dramatically underestimating the time these things can change in and how dramatically technology can change things. In 1997, just twenty years ago, virtually no-one owned a mobile phone or DVD player and only a relatively tiny minority were connected to the Internet. If you told someone then that in just 20 years retail as we know it would change irrevocably, that almost everyone would be carrying a powerful, always-connected computer in their pocket at all times with which they can access any movie or song ever recorded at will, and that you'd be able to check up on how badly the bully from school's life was going whenever you wanted, they'd think you were mad.

I think that the scale of the issue will become clear when self-driving cars suddenly go from being nowhere to being everywhere, and that will happen almost overnight (like how quickly mobile phones became ubiquitous) because the corporate interests behind them are so ruthelessly determined to get rid of expensive human components (especially after Uber lost a whole series of legal cases) and they are pouring so much money into the field. Millions of people in the UK and US (tens or hundreds of millions worldwide) will lose their jobs overnight and, as these jobs are appealing to the low-skilled, they may not have many other options for jobs.

Here's thing, I agree with all that, I just don't think it'll change us into a post-capitalist society. In 2017, the US population was 323 million people and there were on average 125 million people with full-time employment and 27 million with part-time employment. I think half of those jobs could be automated (which I think is an enormous undertaking, and we're more likely to lose 10-20% of those jobs in the near future) and inertia and vested interests would still keep society rumbling along the way it has. There would be greater poverty and lost self-esteem, and likely further increases in substance use, alcoholism, and suicide, but society would not change. There would be no basic income or other safety net increases, and no shift to a post-job world.

Arguably, society might not even change we lost 75-80% of those jobs; but at that point the remaining haves might be relying on true authoritarian power to continue enforcing the status quo.

[felice]

5 hours ago, Fez said:

*For instance, people bring up lawyers a lot as an example of the kind of wide-spread white collar job that is going to get automated and help lead to the changes being described here. I don't think most lawyers will get replaced by automation.

Aside from the people who can't afford human lawyers (like the growing crowds of unemployed), and will have to accept a virtual lawyer no matter how much they'd prefer a human one. And if the virtual lawyers start winning trials, attitudes towards them are likely to change.

[OldGimletEye]

On 12/7/2017 at 10:23 AM, Fez said:

*For instance, people bring up lawyers a lot as an example of the kind of wide-spread white collar job that is going to get automated and help lead to the changes being described here. I don't think most lawyers will get replaced by automation. I think a lot of paralegals and administrative staff will get replaced by automation, but not lawyers themselves. Most lawyers have jobs that require mediation skills (divorce, child custody, law guardian), negotiating skills (everything), and arguing skills (anything that goes trial); skills which are not easily replaced by automation. And even if automation could replace, I think most people wouldn't be comfortable with it and that courts would stick with tradition and demand human lawyers. The only aspect easily automated is legal research, and that's mostly paralegals.

Okay lets say lawyers can still find work, but paralegals are obsolete. The thing is that paralegal work is still pretty skilled work. And if you can get rid of paralegals, you probably can get rid of engineering technicians and bookkeepers, administrative people and other mid-skill positions.

And if the only way to gain decent employment is by going to school for seven or eight years, after high school, I think we're headed for a whole heap of trouble, unless we rethink how capitalism should work.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

10 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Okay lets say lawyers can still find work, but paralegals are obsolete. The thing is that paralegal work is still pretty skilled work. And if you can get rid of paralegals, you probably can get rid of engineering technicians and bookkeepers, administrative people and other mid-skill positions.

And if the only way to gain decent employment is by going to school for seven or eight years, after high school, I think we're headed for a whole heap of trouble, unless we rethink how capitalism should work.

See, I disagree.  Or, I sort of disagree.  I don't think "capitalism" as it is understood today is really "capitalism" as defined in the 18th Century, so I will start there.  I do think that a market-based economy will persist in one form or another.  I also believe that we will, as a society, simply find other things to value and other things to compensate within that model.  I think many of those things are not things that we can in fact imagine. They will simply evolve until they seem like they have always been.  I do not doubt that things will work differently, and that the relationship between the state and the individual will evolve, but that is basically human history.  Oh,and I do think that there will be a lot of displaced persons as the transition occurs - don't doubt that either, but it is a moral and ethical question in the first instance on how that is handled.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

See, I disagree.  Or, I sort of disagree.  I don't think "capitalism" as it is understood today is really "capitalism" as defined in the 18th Century, so I will start there.  I do think that a market-based economy will persist in one form or another.  I also believe that we will, as a society, simply find other things to value and other things to compensate within that model.  I think many of those things are not things that we can in fact imagine. They will simply evolve until they seem like they have always been.  I do not doubt that things will work differently, and that the relationship between the state and the individual will evolve, but that is basically human history.  Oh,and I do think that there will be a lot of displaced persons as the transition occurs - don't doubt that either, but it is a moral and ethical question in the first instance on how that is handled.

Well few things. Despite my often fiery rhetoric, I'm not against markets  as I do think they offer advantages, in particular that the decentralized decision making has some desirable features.

And, I don't think markets will disappear or at least they won't disappear for a long time. But, the potential trouble here is that many people might not be able to participate in these markets ie selling their labor and buying commodities. And while it's true that society may come to value other things, most people will still value having a roof over their head and still being able to eat.

Now, I've misplaced my planatir, the special one that sees in the future, so I'm not quite sure what will happen. So maybe in the future things will continue the way they always have with increasing technology. But, it may not. AI maybe something completely different, as it seemingly may be able to replace most jobs that have been done by labor, until you get to the point that only the most skilled or educated people can find employment. And that potentially creates a very dangerous situation. Now it could be I'm worrying too much, but I think it's something you definitely need to think about and monitor.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 minute ago, OldGimletEye said:

Well few things. Despite my often fiery rhetoric, I'm not against markets  as I do think they offer advantages, in particular that the decentralized decision making has some desirable features.

And, I don't think markets will disappear or at least they won't disappear for a long time. But, the potential trouble here is that many people might not be able to participate in these markets ie selling their labor and buying commodities. And while it's true that society may come to value other things, most people will still value having a roof over their head and still being able to eat.

Now, I've misplaced my planatir, the special one that sees in the future, so I'm not quite sure what will happen. So maybe in the future things will continue the way they always have with increasing technology. But, it may not. AI maybe something completely different, as it seemingly may be able to replace most jobs that have been done by labor, until you get to the point that only the most skilled or educated people can find employment. And that potentially creates a very dangerous situation. Now it could be I'm worrying too much, but I think it's something you definitely need to think about and monitor.

So to clarify my point - I believe labor will simply labor on different things (I mean, my job didn't exist 100 years ago, and even if it did, I wouldn't have been permitted to take it, not that through my labor I'm adding overmuch to the overall human experience (I do a better job with my expenditures there)).  But I'm an optimist, and relatively ok with the idea that we will spend the next century (like the last several millenia) figuring things out the fly.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

So to clarify my point - I believe labor will simply labor on different things (I mean, my job didn't exist 100 years ago, and even if it did, I wouldn't have been permitted to take it, not that through my labor I'm adding overmuch to the overall human experience (I do a better job with my expenditures there)).  But I'm an optimist, and relatively ok with the idea that we will spend the next century (like the last several millenia) figuring things out the fly.

I get what you're saying. And what you believe will happen is what has happened throughout history. So your priors here are quite understandable.

But, AI might be quite different because we're not just talking about a better mousetrap here. We are potentially talking about machines that can replicate human intelligence to a very high degree, and that might be quite different than the inventions of the past.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

29 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I get what you're saying. And what you believe will happen is what has happened throughout history. So your priors here are quite understandable.

But, AI might be quite different because we're not just talking about a better mousetrap here. We are potentially talking about machines that can replicate human intelligence to a very high degree, and that might be quite different than the inventions of the past.

I mean, alternatively we are already living in the matrix, and the programming is pretty $hitty

[maarsen]

2 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

I get what you're saying. And what you believe will happen is what has happened throughout history. So your priors here are quite understandable.

But, AI might be quite different because we're not just talking about a better mousetrap here. We are potentially talking about machines that can replicate human intelligence to a very high degree, and that might be quite different than the inventions of the past.

Let's go back to first principles here. Having robots or AI take over all human jobs cannot be self sustaining. Food is grown for people to eat, cars are made for people to get to their jobs, growing food,selling food, making cars.... Once machines or robots start doing such, where does the money come from to keep the machines in electricity? We could just cut out the middleman, so to speak, and have AIs and robots generate electricity so that they can then generate more electricity for more robots and AIs in an endless cycle. Unless you have robots that need entertainment, or decorations to set them apart in status, or exotic materials to maintain them, any economy that replaces human labour with machine labour will founder unless humans have the ability to spend and access the fruits of robotic labour. A guaranteed income is needed.

[OldGimletEye]

On 12/7/2017 at 5:10 PM, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I mean, alternatively we are already living in the matrix, and the programming is pretty $hitty

Lol.

You’re probably right. I should have learned to not believe the hype after seeing The Phantom Menace and watching Jar Jar Binks for 2 hours.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, maarsen said:

Let's go back to first principles here. Having robots or AI take over all human jobs cannot be self sustaining. Food is grown for people to eat, cars are made for people to get to their jobs, growing food,selling food, making cars.... Once machines or robots start doing such, where does the money come from to keep the machines in electricity? We could just cut out the middleman, so to speak, and have AIs and robots generate electricity so that they can then generate more electricity for more robots and AIs in an endless cycle. Unless you have robots that need entertainment, or decorations to set them apart in status, or exotic materials to maintain them, any economy that replaces human labour with machine labour will founder unless humans have the ability to spend and access the fruits of robotic labour. A guaranteed income is needed.

Well it could be that the people that own AI technology just trade with each other. 

And when this thing takes off, AI tech will great for people that have money to buy the goods. But, for the people that lose their jobs, things won't be great. Maybe there will be some kind of adjustment process where people will eventually find employment. But, that might take quite awhile.

[lumer]

15 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Another possibility is that the resources necessary to sustain this technology start to run out, eventually leading to technological regression.

I think this is the most accurate prediction. Technology, and sustaining it is rich in resources, what will certainly start to run out. This will cause a scarcity, which will be the basis of whatever new economy, long before any utopia or massive UBI or anything.

[S John]

We also can’t discount the possibility of some kind of major event that leads to a major technological setback before we even have to worry about a post capitalist society.  Whether climate disaster (floods, famine), nuclear war, meteor strike, a plauge, general global unrest, alien invasion, zombie apocalypse. etc.  Historically human society tends to advance for a while, have a bit of a crash and then take some time to recover.  We’ve been on a nice run for a while, but that doesn’t make us immune to cataclysm.  

And this is one area where modern humans in developed nations are woefully ill equipped to cope in comparison to our ancestors.  We are highly dependent on technology and tend to have highly specialized niches that take a good deal of education and training and leave us ignorant of the practical day to day survival things as well as the finer points of how the technology around us actually works.  If shit hits the fan it’ll be the primitive cultures in places like Africa and the Amazon who can withstand the trials of simply existing in the natural world sans technology.

[DMC]

1 hour ago, maarsen said:

Let's go back to first principles here. Having robots or AI take over all human jobs cannot be self sustaining. Food is grown for people to eat, cars are made for people to get to their jobs, growing food,selling food, making cars.... Once machines or robots start doing such, where does the money come from to keep the machines in electricity?

Yep - this is a large part of what I'm wondering and tried to express earlier.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Yep - this is a large part of what I'm wondering and tried to express earlier.

Hmm interesting question. 

Lets say we have Robinson Caruso. And Caruso owns all the coconuts and trees that make coconuts. And let’s say he has one worker. The worker is Sam Clownback. And lets say Caruso, with Clownback's labor grows blue coconuts. Caruso doesn’t do anything but provide the coconut and trees. He basically sits on his ass while Clownback provides the labor. And Clownback gets paid a wage.

And let’s say Caruso has a brother on the same island, who does the same thing but grows red coconuts. And has a laborer, who is a brother, to Sam Clownback. We’ll say his name is Bob or whatever.

And we'll say both Clownbacks and Carusos like to consume both blue and red coconuts. Markets clear after trades and a relative price pops out between blue and red coconuts.

Now lets suppose some AI technology appears randomly that can grow and pick coconut trees. Both the Carusos have the AI technology. And since the AI technology can run all the time or nearly all the time, the Carusos don’t need the Clownbacks.

The Clownbacks get paid nada, but the Carusos still trade with each other. Is there a market? Yes there still is. Except the Clownbacks are no longer part of it.

Now maybe the Clownbacks can re-train to do something else, like be governor or something. But, maybe they can’t or they can’t easily retrain.

[DMC]

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

I think that the scale of the issue will become clear when self-driving cars suddenly go from being nowhere to being everywhere, and that will happen almost overnight (like how quickly mobile phones became ubiquitous) because the corporate interests behind them are so ruthelessly determined to get rid of expensive human components (especially after Uber lost a whole series of legal cases) and they are pouring so much money into the field. Millions of people in the UK and US (tens or hundreds of millions worldwide) will lose their jobs overnight and, as these jobs are appealing to the low-skilled, they may not have many other options for jobs.

You're definitely right about the ruthless determination of corporate interests.  However, I don't agree on this depiction of how automated cars will integrate into society.  In terms of the trucking industry, yeah those jobs will be gone, but that's because the vast majority of the job already entails mindless driving on the interstate.  Living in Pittsburgh, I've watched the self-driving movement up close and I'm not particularly impressed.  Here's an excerpt from basically a puff piece on Uber's efforts describing the two "monitors" that are in these test vehicles:

Quote

"Their primary focus is 100 percent of their time to be monitoring the system," Bartel says. Last month, Recode reported that, on average, these Uber autonomous vehicles required a human operator to intervene in the driving every 0.8 mile.

When NPR took a short spin in one of the Uber vehicles, the car behaved like a very cautious driver, stopping for a full three seconds at stop signs and never going above the speed limit. The Uber humans had to take to get around a bulky, parked 18-wheeler and to get the car into and out of the Uber parking lot.

Now, Pittsburgh is fairly unique as an urban area due to all the hills and tunnels - I admire the companies using it as a testing ground because it's close to the hardest terrain a car would encounter in an urban area.  But automated cars are never going to change the natural bottlenecks in Pittsburgh when trying to get downtown, nor the demand-based bottlenecks that exist in any other city.  Automation may make everything safer, which is great, but that also means much slower traffic per car.  And that's what I don't get.  How is automation going to result in less cars on the road?  As far as I can tell, it's not, which means it's never going to solve the inherent traffic problems I've seen in urban areas throughout the US east coast, or lived in in terms of DC, Orlando, and Pittsburgh.  And on top of that, you just have the equivalent of a bunch of grandma drivers that most of us pass using, ya know, human discretion.  

I'm no expert on city planning, but living in the above three cities mentioned above makes me think improving and revolutionizing public transportation in the US would be a much better logistic solution to gridlock than a movement towards robots driving cars instead of asshole people (granted, negating the latter would be a huge plus personally).  Unfortunately, this is of course ignoring the fact the status in Washington means such an effort is as fantastical as the visions for the future described in this thread.

[Altherion]

11 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

The Clownbacks get paid nada, but the Carusos still trade with each other. Is there a market? Yes there still is. Except the Clownbacks are no longer part of it.

Your example is missing the relative scale -- there's a reason the rich are referred to as "the 1%" and in fact that slogan is an overestimate if we're discussing the people who will end up in control of the AI. Suppose there were 100 Clownbacks for every Caruso. The Carusos will undoubtedly get all of the coconuts they can eat, but they can only eat so much and, on aggregate, the Clownbacks who use their wages to buy coconuts from both are a larger fraction of the market than either of the Carusos is for the other. So yes, there would still be a market, but if the Clownbacks can't find other work, the market will shrink substantially.

Also, at some point one of the Clownbacks will either read about or reinvent the ideas of Karl, Vladimir, Zedong et al and then there will be trouble.