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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Seems my sample size of non-binding referenda was biased then, and they are indeed quite routinely just irrelevant.
Pretty stupid to have a referendum if it doesn't actually matter though.
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On October 04 2016 20:30 zatic wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2016 03:57 RvB wrote:On October 01 2016 01:53 zatic wrote:On October 01 2016 00:18 RvB wrote:On September 30 2016 22:54 zatic wrote:On September 30 2016 16:20 RvB wrote:On September 30 2016 06:32 Thaniri wrote:On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote:
It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore? Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous. I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last. On September 30 2016 06:04 zatic wrote:On September 30 2016 04:53 Thaniri wrote:On September 30 2016 04:18 Nyxisto wrote:On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote:
Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better. General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour. Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors. I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc. edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite. You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree. Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale. No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.) That's what I mean by fairytale. It worked in the past, so why worry about it for the present or future, even though we have all evidence that this will become a massive problem. To me this is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending some problems don't exists in the future on the basis that other problems didn't exist in the past. Then show me all that evidence please. You really need evidence that automation replaces human labor? But sure. The most relevant single piece would probably be the now infamous 2013 study on US occupations: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdfWe examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess
this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate
the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a
Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected
impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes,
with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and
the relationship between an occupation’s probability of computerisation,
wages and educational attainment. According to our estimates, about 47
percent of total US employment is at risk. We further provide evidence
that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship
with an occupation’s probability of computerisation. We distinguish between high, medium and low risk occupations, depending
on their probability of computerisation. We make no attempt to estimate
the number of jobs that will actually be automated, and focus on potential job
automatability over some unspecified number of years. According to our estimates
around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category. We
refer to these as jobs at risk – i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively
soon, perhaps over the next decade or two.
Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations,
together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and
labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with
recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly,
we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations,
where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn,
44
2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation. Additional support for this
finding is provided by the recent growth in the market for service robots (MGI,
2013) and the gradually diminishment of the comparative advantage of human
labour in tasks involving mobility and dexterity (Robotics-VO, 2013). No I don't want evidence that technology replaces labour that was never the discussion. I want evidence that it causes unemployment, that the jobs which the new technology creates are less than the jobs it destroys. Overall paid employment has risen in most countries. In the six considered here, only Japan has seen a decline.
This is driven by increasing participation of women, and increases in population, including immigration in some cases. It is also caused by the increasing demand for services, and the creation of completely new products and markets, often related to the application of electronics to communication. The statistics mainly point to reduction in employment in manufacturing in the developed countries, but this is often a small reduction. It coincides with an increase in output and an increase in robotics use except in the case of Japan. The extra number that have gained employment in the years 2000 to 2008 is far greater than the small numbers losing their jobs in manufacturing.
The new jobs have been in:
1) distribution and services, Some of the distribution jobs are the result of manufacturers outsourcing their distribution. In the past these jobs would have been classified as part of manufacturing.
2) and also in new manufacturing applications, particularly using technology advances to create new consumer products [mobile phones, computers, games etc]. In the industrialising countries, as could be expected, there has been a sharp
rise in employment in manufacturing, as well as increase in output. Productivity increases are not just caused by automation and robotics, but it is one of three main factors, along with increased size of manufacturing plants and the
globalisation of sourcing. Note: while the IFR numbers provide a clear basis from which to work, it has not always been possible to separate robotics from automation in our analyses.
Individual countries differ greatly, the importance of manufacturing is only 11% of employment in USA…but 24% in Germany and as high as 27% in more recently industrialising countries such as The Republic of Korea,
The level of robotics use has almost always doubled, in all of the six countries [except Japan] in the eight years covered by the study. The proportion of the workforce that is unemployed has hardly changed in this period. [see charts opposite and table overleaf]. www.ifr.orgFrom an article in the economist: Automating a particular task, so that it can be done more quickly or cheaply, increases the demand for human workers to do the other tasks around it that have not been automated. During the Industrial Revolution more and more tasks in the weaving process were automated, prompting workers to focus on the things machines could not do, such as operating a machine, and then tending multiple machines to keep them running smoothly. This caused output to grow explosively. In America during the 19th century the amount of coarse cloth a single weaver could produce in an hour increased by a factor of 50, and the amount of labour required per yard of cloth fell by 98%. This made cloth cheaper and increased demand for it, which in turn created more jobs for weavers: their numbers quadrupled between 1830 and 1900. In other words, technology gradually changed the nature of the weaver’s job, and the skills required to do it, rather than replacing it altogether. The same pattern can be seen in industry after industry after the introduction of computers, says Mr Bessen: rather than destroying jobs, automation redefines them, and in ways that reduce costs and boost demand. In a recent analysis of the American workforce between 1982 and 2012, he found that employment grew significantly faster in occupations (for example, graphic design) that made more use of computers, as automation sped up one aspect of a job, enabling workers to do the other parts better. The net effect was that more computer-intensive jobs within an industry displaced less computer-intensive ones. Computers thus reallocate rather than displace jobs, requiring workers to learn new skills. This is true of a wide range of occupations, Mr Bessen found, not just in computer-related fields such as software development but also in administrative work, health care and many other areas. Only manufacturing jobs expanded more slowly than the workforce did over the period of study, but that had more to do with business cycles and offshoring to China than with technology, he says. For example, the introduction of software capable of analysing large volumes of legal documents might have been expected to reduce the number of legal clerks and paralegals, who act as human search engines during the “discovery” phase of a case; in fact automation has reduced the cost of discovery and increased demand for it. “Judges are more willing to allow discovery now, because it’s cheaper and easier,” says Mr Bessen. The number of legal clerks in America increased by 1.1% a year between 2000 and 2013. Similarly, the automation of shopping through e-commerce, along with more accurate recommendations, encourages people to buy more and has increased overall employment in retailing. Focusing only on what is lost misses “a central economic mechanism by which automation affects the demand for labour”, notes Mr Autor: that it raises the value of the tasks that can be done only by humans. Ultimately, he says, those worried that automation will cause mass unemployment are succumbing to what economists call the “lump of labour” fallacy. “This notion that there’s only a finite amount of work to do, and therefore that if you automate some of it there’s less for people to do, is just totally wrong,” he says. Those sounding warnings about technological unemployment “basically ignore the issue of the economic response to automation”, says Mr Bessen. www.economist.comThe economist article is behind a pay wall but you can read it if you create an account. But yeah man. Fairy tales... The first part to me is the classic fairytale. It worked out in the past, so let's not worry about the future. The second part is more interesting, but doesn't address (my) main concern. There are a number of ways in which future automatization will be different than past: - The main driver will be software, not hardware. This has several effects: - Pace of technological progress (in software) is about an order of magnitudes faster than past progress on machines. The Otto engine was invented in 1878. Full motorization in industrialized countries took until the 1960s. That's a 80 year transitionary period. The first successful DARPA grand challenge was in 2005. It took less than 10 years for completely automous vehicles driving daily. The automation of much of today's car fleet - and with it millions of jobs - is likely years, not decades away. - Software can be copied and doesn't have to be rebuilt from scratch in every country. A few hundred engineers in Silicon Vallye have to potential to displace millions of jobs worldwide. I have no idea how significant this effect will play out to be since people like to reinvent the self-driving wheel, but it's a fundamental difference to the past. - Countries "catching up" will likely in large parts skip the transitionary phase of moving work from manual labor into service sector jobs, and automate both at the same time. But really, I am not even arguing that we will have unemployment necessarily as a result. My main concern is that human labor in general is required in two areas: Jobs that machines can't do, and jobs that machines are too expensive for (or/and can't do). The first area was great for us humans in the past, because there was simply way more that machines couldn't do than that they could do. But this is the window I see closing at an accelerated pace. The jobs left will be either very well paying jobs that require a higher and higher skill set (think computer linguist), or jobs that require unique human elements (think nurse). The problem with the second category - as well as with jobs that machines are too expensive for - is that they generally pay shitty. So yes, maybe we still will have jobs in the future. But the majority of those will pay shitty. What I am missing is where the millions of reasonably well paying jobs should come from that will likely be replaced. Thinking that they will just magically appear - within a few years no less - is to me believing in fairytales.
I don't see any of that happening in Belgium. Sure, jobs that can be done more efficiently by computers are being cut by the thousands per year (much to the benefit of the customer, but to the detriment of the employee), but nursing jobs pay far from badly (as far as bachelor's degree holders go, few college graduates make as much as nurses in the beginning of their careers), and our labour market seems forever starved for people with highly technical skills. A skilled craftsman with a modicum of business sense can rake in quite a bit of money. The problem is the current generation of those aged 45 and older, the generation that came after the babyboom generation: they are largely middle schooled doing the kind of jobs that get increasingly automated. While I do believe that new technology will automatically bring in new types of jobs, I am quite sure that most of these jobs will be beyond the skill pool of much of the current Belgian labour market.
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Lets say there are 10 things you can do after high school:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
If 10 people graduate every year and fill those 10 roles everyone has something to do. If ABCDE get automated, there are 10 people who are trying to do FGHIJ. That means that some of these roles will be over-saturated with more than 1 person trying to do it.
Any labour that is in abundance is cheap. Example: chinese factory workers. Example: there are more web developers than software developers, so web developers (at least starting out) earn less.
If everyone is studying to be a nurse, then they won't be as valuable due to numbers.
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This is why we should not accept capitalism.
Our taxes drive innovation, innovation makes our labour useless and the gains go to the ones who already have the capital.
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Why nvm? I will ask for you since I can't figure it out based on his post history.
DickMcFanny are you serious?
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I think he meant tax innovation (avoidance), not innovation in general as I initially thought.
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On October 05 2016 06:05 Sent. wrote:
I think he meant tax innovation (avoidance), not innovation in general as I initially thought.
What are you talking about?
Most new tech is publicly funded at first. Who do you think subsidized the computer industry for decades before computers became commercially viable?
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Sorry, I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. Since I was wrong: DickMcFanny are you serious? You sound like a Luddite
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On October 05 2016 02:54 maartendq wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 20:30 zatic wrote:On October 01 2016 03:57 RvB wrote:On October 01 2016 01:53 zatic wrote:On October 01 2016 00:18 RvB wrote:On September 30 2016 22:54 zatic wrote:On September 30 2016 16:20 RvB wrote:On September 30 2016 06:32 Thaniri wrote:On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote:
It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore? Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous. I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last. On September 30 2016 06:04 zatic wrote:On September 30 2016 04:53 Thaniri wrote:On September 30 2016 04:18 Nyxisto wrote:
[quote]
General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour. Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors. I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc. edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite. You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree. Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale. No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.) That's what I mean by fairytale. It worked in the past, so why worry about it for the present or future, even though we have all evidence that this will become a massive problem. To me this is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending some problems don't exists in the future on the basis that other problems didn't exist in the past. Then show me all that evidence please. You really need evidence that automation replaces human labor? But sure. The most relevant single piece would probably be the now infamous 2013 study on US occupations: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdfWe examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess
this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate
the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a
Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected
impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes,
with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and
the relationship between an occupation’s probability of computerisation,
wages and educational attainment. According to our estimates, about 47
percent of total US employment is at risk. We further provide evidence
that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship
with an occupation’s probability of computerisation. We distinguish between high, medium and low risk occupations, depending
on their probability of computerisation. We make no attempt to estimate
the number of jobs that will actually be automated, and focus on potential job
automatability over some unspecified number of years. According to our estimates
around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category. We
refer to these as jobs at risk – i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively
soon, perhaps over the next decade or two.
Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations,
together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and
labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with
recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly,
we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations,
where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn,
44
2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation. Additional support for this
finding is provided by the recent growth in the market for service robots (MGI,
2013) and the gradually diminishment of the comparative advantage of human
labour in tasks involving mobility and dexterity (Robotics-VO, 2013). No I don't want evidence that technology replaces labour that was never the discussion. I want evidence that it causes unemployment, that the jobs which the new technology creates are less than the jobs it destroys. Overall paid employment has risen in most countries. In the six considered here, only Japan has seen a decline.
This is driven by increasing participation of women, and increases in population, including immigration in some cases. It is also caused by the increasing demand for services, and the creation of completely new products and markets, often related to the application of electronics to communication. The statistics mainly point to reduction in employment in manufacturing in the developed countries, but this is often a small reduction. It coincides with an increase in output and an increase in robotics use except in the case of Japan. The extra number that have gained employment in the years 2000 to 2008 is far greater than the small numbers losing their jobs in manufacturing.
The new jobs have been in:
1) distribution and services, Some of the distribution jobs are the result of manufacturers outsourcing their distribution. In the past these jobs would have been classified as part of manufacturing.
2) and also in new manufacturing applications, particularly using technology advances to create new consumer products [mobile phones, computers, games etc]. In the industrialising countries, as could be expected, there has been a sharp
rise in employment in manufacturing, as well as increase in output. Productivity increases are not just caused by automation and robotics, but it is one of three main factors, along with increased size of manufacturing plants and the
globalisation of sourcing. Note: while the IFR numbers provide a clear basis from which to work, it has not always been possible to separate robotics from automation in our analyses.
Individual countries differ greatly, the importance of manufacturing is only 11% of employment in USA…but 24% in Germany and as high as 27% in more recently industrialising countries such as The Republic of Korea,
The level of robotics use has almost always doubled, in all of the six countries [except Japan] in the eight years covered by the study. The proportion of the workforce that is unemployed has hardly changed in this period. [see charts opposite and table overleaf]. www.ifr.orgFrom an article in the economist: Automating a particular task, so that it can be done more quickly or cheaply, increases the demand for human workers to do the other tasks around it that have not been automated. During the Industrial Revolution more and more tasks in the weaving process were automated, prompting workers to focus on the things machines could not do, such as operating a machine, and then tending multiple machines to keep them running smoothly. This caused output to grow explosively. In America during the 19th century the amount of coarse cloth a single weaver could produce in an hour increased by a factor of 50, and the amount of labour required per yard of cloth fell by 98%. This made cloth cheaper and increased demand for it, which in turn created more jobs for weavers: their numbers quadrupled between 1830 and 1900. In other words, technology gradually changed the nature of the weaver’s job, and the skills required to do it, rather than replacing it altogether. The same pattern can be seen in industry after industry after the introduction of computers, says Mr Bessen: rather than destroying jobs, automation redefines them, and in ways that reduce costs and boost demand. In a recent analysis of the American workforce between 1982 and 2012, he found that employment grew significantly faster in occupations (for example, graphic design) that made more use of computers, as automation sped up one aspect of a job, enabling workers to do the other parts better. The net effect was that more computer-intensive jobs within an industry displaced less computer-intensive ones. Computers thus reallocate rather than displace jobs, requiring workers to learn new skills. This is true of a wide range of occupations, Mr Bessen found, not just in computer-related fields such as software development but also in administrative work, health care and many other areas. Only manufacturing jobs expanded more slowly than the workforce did over the period of study, but that had more to do with business cycles and offshoring to China than with technology, he says. For example, the introduction of software capable of analysing large volumes of legal documents might have been expected to reduce the number of legal clerks and paralegals, who act as human search engines during the “discovery” phase of a case; in fact automation has reduced the cost of discovery and increased demand for it. “Judges are more willing to allow discovery now, because it’s cheaper and easier,” says Mr Bessen. The number of legal clerks in America increased by 1.1% a year between 2000 and 2013. Similarly, the automation of shopping through e-commerce, along with more accurate recommendations, encourages people to buy more and has increased overall employment in retailing. Focusing only on what is lost misses “a central economic mechanism by which automation affects the demand for labour”, notes Mr Autor: that it raises the value of the tasks that can be done only by humans. Ultimately, he says, those worried that automation will cause mass unemployment are succumbing to what economists call the “lump of labour” fallacy. “This notion that there’s only a finite amount of work to do, and therefore that if you automate some of it there’s less for people to do, is just totally wrong,” he says. Those sounding warnings about technological unemployment “basically ignore the issue of the economic response to automation”, says Mr Bessen. www.economist.comThe economist article is behind a pay wall but you can read it if you create an account. But yeah man. Fairy tales... The first part to me is the classic fairytale. It worked out in the past, so let's not worry about the future. The second part is more interesting, but doesn't address (my) main concern. There are a number of ways in which future automatization will be different than past: - The main driver will be software, not hardware. This has several effects: - Pace of technological progress (in software) is about an order of magnitudes faster than past progress on machines. The Otto engine was invented in 1878. Full motorization in industrialized countries took until the 1960s. That's a 80 year transitionary period. The first successful DARPA grand challenge was in 2005. It took less than 10 years for completely automous vehicles driving daily. The automation of much of today's car fleet - and with it millions of jobs - is likely years, not decades away. - Software can be copied and doesn't have to be rebuilt from scratch in every country. A few hundred engineers in Silicon Vallye have to potential to displace millions of jobs worldwide. I have no idea how significant this effect will play out to be since people like to reinvent the self-driving wheel, but it's a fundamental difference to the past. - Countries "catching up" will likely in large parts skip the transitionary phase of moving work from manual labor into service sector jobs, and automate both at the same time. But really, I am not even arguing that we will have unemployment necessarily as a result. My main concern is that human labor in general is required in two areas: Jobs that machines can't do, and jobs that machines are too expensive for (or/and can't do). The first area was great for us humans in the past, because there was simply way more that machines couldn't do than that they could do. But this is the window I see closing at an accelerated pace. The jobs left will be either very well paying jobs that require a higher and higher skill set (think computer linguist), or jobs that require unique human elements (think nurse). The problem with the second category - as well as with jobs that machines are too expensive for - is that they generally pay shitty. So yes, maybe we still will have jobs in the future. But the majority of those will pay shitty. What I am missing is where the millions of reasonably well paying jobs should come from that will likely be replaced. Thinking that they will just magically appear - within a few years no less - is to me believing in fairytales. I don't see any of that happening in Belgium. Sure, jobs that can be done more efficiently by computers are being cut by the thousands per year (much to the benefit of the customer, but to the detriment of the employee), but nursing jobs pay far from badly (as far as bachelor's degree holders go, few college graduates make as much as nurses in the beginning of their careers), and our labour market seems forever starved for people with highly technical skills. A skilled craftsman with a modicum of business sense can rake in quite a bit of money. The problem is the current generation of those aged 45 and older, the generation that came after the babyboom generation: they are largely middle schooled doing the kind of jobs that get increasingly automated. While I do believe that new technology will automatically bring in new types of jobs, I am quite sure that most of these jobs will be beyond the skill pool of much of the current Belgian labour market.
Not directly aimed at you, more at the discussion thread.
The classical example of the industrialisation with massive increase in output is a very bad idea. We talk about resource scarcity on this planet and then talk about producing more things to give everybody jobs. The opposite should be the desired outcome, less production due to products lasting longer and people not wanting things they don't need.
That is at least my basis for assuming we will run out of jobs. Assume we are making 100 units of stuff per person in the western world right now. We increase that 110 and automate the 10, keeping work the same. Then we automate another 10 and demand for stuff does not go up. So now we removed employement for 8 units (2 units servicing automation). Of course this will stop at some point but if we manage to improve quality of goods demand will hopefully go down overall. Some industries like food demand won't go down until genetic engineering comes much much further than it currently has.
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On October 05 2016 06:14 DickMcFanny wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2016 06:05 Sent. wrote:
I think he meant tax innovation (avoidance), not innovation in general as I initially thought. What are you talking about? Most new tech is publicly funded at first. Who do you think subsidized the computer industry for decades before computers became commercially viable?
Most new tech is publicly funded? Seriously? This is super provably factually incorrect.
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he can easily rephrase it like new tech that was/is/will be readily available to the public and win all arguments.
new tech that you have to sell a kidney and some liver to get, is no tech at all as far as the general populace is concerned; or the new tech going into the state defense apparatus instead of medicine(drugs)/housing(some exquisite new building materials)/agriculture(NASA research on food and out of space sustainability) etcetcetc.
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In a lot of industries he is absolutely right.
Fundamental research is completely dependent on public spending.
For example, the usual way a new drug is found routes almost always back to a university research group.
And don't forget, a lot of research in private companies is only enabled by military contracts so in essence by public funding.
Aerospace is another good example. People don't realize, that there is not a single jet airplane in our skies that was privately funded or even 'privately' produced (just look up things like tax credits for airplane OEMs, launch aids, state loans, ex/imp bank loans, military airplane 'prices').
Whole industries would not be here if it were not for public funding!
Hell, even the most important growth motor of the past, the railway, would not be here without the state. Most early railway companies went bankrupt and had to be rescued by the state (if they were not state-run from the start).
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On October 05 2016 17:33 lord_nibbler wrote:
In a lot of industries he is absolutely right.
Fundamental research is completely dependent on public spending.
For example, the usual way a new drug is found routes almost always back to a university research group.
And don't forget, a lot of research in private companies is only enabled by military contracts so in essence by public funding.
Aerospace is another good example. People don't realize, that there is not a single jet airplane in our skies that was privately funded or even 'privately' produced (just look up things like tax credits for airplane OEMs, launch aids, state loans, ex/imp bank loans, military airplane 'prices').
Whole industries would not be here if it were not for public funding!
Hell, even the most important growth motor of the past, the railway, would not be here without the state. Most early railway companies went bankrupt and had to be rescued by the state (if they were not state-run from the start).
And don't forget pretty much all innovations in energy. Almost all the science was done in universities or public research institutes, and even the private endeavours are incredibly heavily government funded. That includes things like solar panels, wind turbines, improved storage and transmission (smart grid), biofuel, geothermal energy, tidal energy, etc. etc. Hell, probably even fracking was initially some professor's pet project.
Big oil's R&D is almost exclusively focused on finding and exploiting oil fields (more remote and deeper, atm).
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Yes, and I may add that in energy everything 'nuclear' is also "100% public first, privatized later".
Though the very first invention in mass energy production is the counterexample.
James Watt had only private investors if I remember correctly.
Edit: And a quick look at his wiki page reveals, he came up with his steam machine model working at the university of Glasgow...
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On October 05 2016 12:39 Yoav wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2016 06:14 DickMcFanny wrote:On October 05 2016 06:05 Sent. wrote:
I think he meant tax innovation (avoidance), not innovation in general as I initially thought. What are you talking about? Most new tech is publicly funded at first. Who do you think subsidized the computer industry for decades before computers became commercially viable? Most new tech is publicly funded? Seriously? This is super provably factually incorrect.
not really. most truly revolutionary tech was started from government kindling (ie military) and carefully nurtured there until it could grow into the raging profit-making fires of capitalism in the private sector
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On October 05 2016 12:39 Yoav wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2016 06:14 DickMcFanny wrote:On October 05 2016 06:05 Sent. wrote:
I think he meant tax innovation (avoidance), not innovation in general as I initially thought. What are you talking about? Most new tech is publicly funded at first. Who do you think subsidized the computer industry for decades before computers became commercially viable? Most new tech is publicly funded? Seriously? This is super provably factually incorrect.
"Factually incorrect", he typed on a computer based on technology invented and curated by public funds for half a century before it was able to make a profit.
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So why import millions of mostly unskilled migrants from Africa and the Mid East when half the jobs will be automated in 10 years anyway.
That process would be very tough to manage in a monocultural society, good luck in societies with ethnic & religious tensions.
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On October 06 2016 21:45 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:
So why import millions of mostly unskilled migrants from Africa and the Mid East when half the jobs will be automated in 10 years anyway.
That process would be very tough to manage in a monocultural society, good luck in societies with ethnic & religious tensions.
A firm has a choice between various combinaison of capital and labor. Capital will replace labor when it is more productive only if it is possible to substitute capital and labor (switching a certain quantity of labor with a certain quantity of capital). In this situation, the only way to prevent an increase in unemployment is to make more qualified labor (to compete with capital) or to lower the price of labor.
In this scheme, migrants are perfects : they offer cheaper labor.
But again, I don't believe labor and capital to be perfectly substituable to begin with.
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EPT
