How is this not getting more work done? It sounds exactly like more work is getting done to me.
By your standard, does the industrial revolution mean that more work is being done?
For example, let's say that the task is to add up a list of 10,000 numbers. It might take a human a while to accomplish this accurately. A computer won't take much time at all. The computer is accomplishing the same work as the human in a much shorter amount of time. The computer could handle a vast number of such tasks per day for a lower price than any human, with better accuracy.
Similarly, imagine hauling cargo across the country. A human could put the packages on their back and walk, or alternatively a human and freight train team could haul them by rail. The human and freight train team accomplishes vastly more work than the human alone, and is able to haul much larger and heavier packages at a much faster speed.
"Speed" is almost directly exactly analogous to "increased productivity" isn't it?
Also accuracy - reducing scrap means more can be produced with less materials in less time.
"working with more unknowns" - doing things that couldn't be done before.
These all seem to be kinds of "getting more work done".
Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary.
I guess I also just don't see much difference. All that will happen will be again a shift away from many kinds of jobs (the easily automatible ones) to different kinds.
I mean, there are all kinds of jobs now that didn't exist 50 years ago (software engineer, social media manager, influencer, etc. etc.)
Mechanisation of the textile industry led to vast increases in the quantity of production. Prior to the industrial revolution, most peasants would have owned only one set of clothes and replaced them only when they were entirely beyond repair. Cheap cloth created demand for wardrobes and dressers, because a lot of people were now in the peculiar position of owning more clothes than they could wear at once.
The luddites were ultimately wrong because of Jevons paradox - labour efficiencies in the textile industry vastly increased the demand for their product, and with it their demand for labour. Hand-loom weavers didn't lose their livelihoods to the power loom, they just made ten times as much cloth for twice the wage.
Automation and mechanisation in other manufacturing sectors likewise stimulated vastly increased consumer demand, contributing to a virtuous cycle of increasing profit, wages and living standards. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the efficiencies of mass-manufacturing gave ordinary people secure employment and access to a dizzying array of consumer goods. The more stuff we made, the more stuff we could afford to buy.
I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern. A lot of tech-heavy businesses seem to be startlingly close to zero-sum. Uber has decimated the taxi industry, but it doesn't seem to have vastly increased overall ridership - the most generous figures I've seen suggest perhaps a 40% increase in some markets. Google and Facebook have become multi-billion dollar companies through advertising revenue, but the overall growth of ad spending across all media has barely outpaced inflation, with the newspaper industry being the most obvious casualty. I can't think of many major tech companies that didn't kill an industry.
I'd love to be proven wrong.
AI/ML which can mine through sports footage to create highlight reels and funny clip collections, etc will create tons of consumer goods (videos) which can all be monetized on Youtube. Just one example.
How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite a lot more people to watch movies and tv than before.
Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.
... and the word 'cable cutters' is being thrown around with a lot more intensity, plus various charts of rapidly declining cable TV viewership.
> Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.
[gestures at the latest brick-and-mortar bookstore news with B+N on the rocks and Borders in its grave ... given AMZ got it's start as a bookseller.]
A pessimistic response to be sure (and one that I'm reluctantly making), but there's coincidence, and then there's a pattern that starts emerging whenever a disruptor unicorn cements its place into an industry.
this is by definition "increasing productivity" isn't it?
> All that will happen will be again a shift away from many kinds of jobs (the easily automatible ones) to different kinds.
If that's true, then what will the shift be to? These are interesting questions. And how long will the shift take? Because I think there is a general feeling that current levels of inequality - the "hollowing out" of the middle class - are due to trends in automation.
A few possibilities, at least short term:
Some manufacturing returns to the US with help of robots. Maybe even as an exportible industry.
Maybe it's possible to simplify those complex jobs that more people could do them?
It's possible for the some of the new,highly automated industries to be a net job creator. For example one scenario for self-driving is that it will be partly remotely-operated ,i.e. jobs , instead of people driving themselves.
Things may become cheaper and people will spend the money left on human based experiences/services ? Or even an whole economy based on human interaction because that's the one thing robots couldn't do?
Or like we always did , we'll find some useless thing(like consumerism) that will create jobs and build society around it ?
I think the shift will probably be towards internet-based jobs. Content creation / software development / content curation (think social media managers) / customer service, the things that it's hard for AI to get right.
It will probably take longer and definitely leave some malcontents but, so did the stocking frame.
Automation right now can eliminate most farm laborers. So why are there still so many farm laborers in the world? Because
a) human wages in most of the world are cheaper than expensive machinery
b) There isn't a profit motive to automate away jobs that pay so little
c) structure of society is such that many technologies take decades upon decades to trickle out to most people in the world (talking the whole world here, not just Euromerica).
In addition, the service economy won't be automated away for a long time because human contact is valued by lots of people in that field. Service economy scales with the purchasing power of communities and AI is going to create a consolidation of purchasing power wherever it is introduced.
It was largely used to employ cheap labor to produce crap. The luddites produced higher value artisinal goods.
The luddites weren't reactionaries intent on destroying technology any more than strikers are protesting against the concept of 'work', they were just saboteurs trying to improve their negotiating position.
The whole thing about them being anti-technology is historical revisionism. Similarly, French taxi anti-uber strikers in 2013 were literally depicted by Forbes as being "anti smartphone" - the motive for the lie being the same in both cases.
The reason why low wage employment and crap clothes were more economically successful at the time had more to do with the economically hemorrhaging effect of the Napoleonic wars - which led to cheaper, more desperate labor and a demand for cheaper goods. It's a bit like how McDonalds gets a sales boost during recessions while mid range restaurants take a hit.
In 2011, for instance, amid a period of labor unrest, Hong hai announced to the world with much fanfare that they were going to soon eliminate 1 million jobs with robots. They subsequently created about 400,000 jobs. Nobody noticed.
After the industrial revolution, the enclosure movement was used to strip peasants of their land. After being dispossessed, they were then desperate enough to accept the paltry wages and disgusting working conditions offered by the factory owners.
Today, a Chinese factory worker may be saving money because they need to care for their infirm grandmother living in a cancer village because the state provides little to no social welfare support for her.
Do you think it's germane to argue on a moral basis that because China provides no welfare for that grandmother that American factory workers ought to take a pay cut?
Personally, I think trade policy needs to be intimately connected to human rights and environmental and labor conditions. No improvement in those sectors, no deal. That isn't the world we live in though. We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.
It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now.
I also want to point out that, yes, in a globally competitive world wages become globally competitive. If a Chinese worker with an infirm grandmother is surviving on a lower wage than an American was making without an infirm grandmother, then that American needs to find better work, do better quality work, or take a pay cut. We would never force consumers to buy products produced only by ethical means or only by human-rights approved conditions (if that were the case, no more chocolate!). Why would we do that to multinational companies?
There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals and all the goods skyrocketed in price leading to another Great Depression.
> We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.
You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities. I'm not saying everyone should be enslaved. But if consumers have the right to purchase such ill-made goods, then companies have the right to offshore their labor forces to such places too.
$100 is sheer fantasy. It might double the price of a shirt from $6 to $12.
>There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals
This is actually how it used to happen and this is partly how TPP was killed in Congress (by attaching an anti-slavery rider).
>You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities.
No, I'm more than happy to pay a extra for chocolate, coffee, clothes and computer parts if I get to live in a world where labor exploitation, environmental destruction and slavery is made more difficult.
Are you really willing to go on the record and state that your preference is for the opposite?
Honestly, IMO scaling down western consumerism by a lot (for example, by fixing and mending the same small set of shirts for years) would be a small price to pay for the resulting increase global happiness. We more or less lived like that during communism in Poland (chocolate, coffee, oranges were uncommon, meat was not an obvious choice for dinner, we fixed appliances, electronics and cars for decades) and I think people might have actually been happier back then.
Those shifts - i.e. the industrial revolution - were enormously disruptive!
Assuming that this is happening; or going to happen, how can we smooth it out a bit?
And of course; that is on the basis that this is not a science fiction AI special; in which case an even more thoughtful approach might be required to minimise the damage and maximise happiness; or whatever variable you prefer.
Like, let's say we know factory workers will be laid off, so we need to allocate resources to retrain them.
Very likely the resources will not be enough for all the workers. So who gets them and who doesn't will become a political battle, with the left-out group resenting everyone in society and society ignoring their needs because it reminds them that they left them behind.
And then you build a society where one group's triumph is based on another's suppression, and you can see where this is going...