> This is why politicians are wrong to try to solve unemployment with tech.
The second does not follow from the first. Technology will always be killing jobs, and local politicians can do nothing to prevent that. The only difference they can make is where the profits from the old jobs go to; if they just stand by and watch, they will all go to companies in a few global tech centres, most in the US. However, if they encourage the development of a local tech scene, the efficiency problem might be solved by local entrepreneurs, meaning that they can still tax the profits, etc., making the local population better off.
Also, I strongly disagree with your claim that "We are wired to work". We are raised to work. And by "we", I mean particularly the people far away from the equator, who always needed to work to survive. Personally, I would not work if I didn't need it for survival (or more free time in the future), and I'm certain there's many more people like me in the world. Why do you think kids play in their free time, and teenagers party?
There is still an immense amount of work to be done in schools, hospitals and social services that is not being obsoleted by technology anytime soon. It is not being done or done well because of a lack of money.
The solution then is much more taxes on capital, much less on human labour and way more redistribution.
:) However, I believe there is a world possible for both of us, as you can do the work while I relax, and we are both happy.
For me, to relax means to be without obligations, not to be completely idle.
Yes, but those efficiencies open new possibilities. Transistors killed abaci and slide rules, and made skills in their use suddenly redundant.
Fast forward, and I'm reading about people employed to make realtime peer to peer video between any two people in the world.
Yes, truly self improving AI would change everything, and probably spell the end of the traditional economy, but I think we're a long while off yet.
That was a solved problem in 1998.
1. Is the rate of creating new possibilities equal to or greater than the rate of killing jobs?
If yes:
2. Is the difficulty of retraining our workforce today equal to or less than the difficulty of retraining our workforce in the past?
If yes:
3. Is the rate of retraining our workforce equal to or greater than the rate of creating new possibilities?
If yes:
Then yes, we don't have a problem.
We are now entering a period in which middle and high paying jobs being replaced by machines. High-frequency trading replaced a whole profession in the financial sectors. There are now machines that are capable to analyze an x-ray image and determine the cause of the problem, leaving the doctor with "just" the job of delivering the news.
So, yes, we do have a problem. I'm not a Neo Luddite. The purpose of this is not to destroy the Internet and all the machines, but I do think that we need to have an ongoing debate about the social structures that we are dissolving as much as about those that we want to build up.
But it also created one. Someone has to both conceive and write each algo. This looks like the old profession, except with different people because Excel is being replaced by C++.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...
The algos can be created by fewer people. Traders are being replaced by the algos, and fewer people are required to create the algos than do the original trading. So your point does not have a 1-to-1 job creation-destruction ratio.
They have a link to the slide deck of a Federal Reserve about what was lossed and what was gained. Sadly, it didn't display in my browser.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/28/h...
In order to take the right lessons from tech's failings you need to separate the tech from its social consequences. The fundamental problem with tech is that it kills jobs. It is about seeking greater efficiency in all things. This is why politicians are wrong to try to solve unemployment with tech. It would be great if everyone could move up the food chain in terms of creative and technical work and that tech could create more jobs, but the problem is that by its very nature, the 1% in the tech world will be more efficient than the bottom 90% no matter how much training they receive. 100 great developers will produce better returns than 10000 bad developers. There's no way around this fact. Hell, if you have a powerful enough intelligence that was orders of magnitude smarter than the smartest human then it could obsolete developers entirely by being more productive on its own than all the worlds smartest developers.
Increased efficiency is theoretically good, but we're reaching the point where we don't have the social capabilities to cope. We are wired to work, and to need to feel needed, and to feel that we have an upward trajectory in life. These things make it very difficult to cope with the impending unemployment crisis and the environmental consequences of a ballooning disposable culture. Tech is at the very heart of these issues, but Silicon Valley is not the cause of these problems, it's just one microcosm of them.