"Progress" or: How I learned to stop worrying and love robots. 2

[Jabberwocky]

Ok, I'm sure this is a discussion that has gone 'round and 'round - but I want to ask my question fresh:

Is it inevitable that technological progress (defined as increasing efficiency allowing fewer people to do more with less) will result in the unemployment of the majority of the population?

Put another way, if we can outsource (to machines) every task that is repetitive in the least, won't the only jobs left be on the creative/design side?

It seems to me (in my limited experience) that the worldwide population is increasing and efficiency is reducing the physical number of jobs overall. If you keep reducing the middleman, isn't the end result a creative person who manifests their ideas through the simple push of a button?

 

[TheTick]

It seems to me that history has already answered this question: There is more technology, more people, and more jobs.

 

[SomptingGuy]

Is building robots a repetitive task best left to robots?

 

[wes616]

I had a thought that the next trend in CAD will be for the designer to think about a product (while hooked up to a machine), then a hour later a prototype will pop out of the "4-D" printer...

Wes C.
------------------------------
There are no engineers in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent engineer would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.

 

[Slugger926]

When you create robots to take over the tasks of an industry, you have just created jobs to create robots, and repair robots.

 

[Jabberwocky]

I'm quite sure that the trend we616 mentions is possible, after seeing what rapid prototyping machines and automated factories can do - coupled with the electronics that can pick up on brain signals nowadays.

Ok then, if every robot (automated manufacturer) created creates more jobs and not less (is that efficiency?), then are we resigning ourselves to a future of robot maintenance?

And yes, building robots should be done by robots, although at least we'll have the creative bits left for ourselves.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Another note, I did not mean to imply the bad type of unemployment in my original post - I meant the nice utopian kind where people can do what they want without having to "work" just to get by.

 

[rb1957]

"isn't the end result a creative person who manifests their ideas through the simple push of a button?" ...

doesn't sound very creative does it ?

 

[moltenmetal]

The 1950s utopian view of automation increasing people's access to leisure and eliminating drudgery in favour of jobs which value human dignity has proven utterly false. People are working at least as many hours now as they did in the '50s, except now it's BOTH parents normally working outside the home rather than merely one. Sure, many families could get by on one salary and choose to have the 2nd parent work so they can consume more conspicuously, but for many the 2nd income is necessary merely to provide food, shelter, clothing, transporation and education for the kids. Sure it's a case of our standards of what is normal and acceptable changing over time to some degree, but it's also a sign of the changes in labour productivity due to automation and other technological development.

Automation has increased labour force "productivity" by increasing the dollar value of goods produced by each (human) worker. Automation does nothing if it replaces an assembly line job with an engineer's job or technician's job making robots- there'd be no value proposition in that and nobody would be buying robots if that were the case. A robot replaces a factory worker's job with 1/100th of an engineer or technician's job making and repairing robots such that there's a payback on the cost of the robot and profit for both the robot-maker and their client.

The consequence is that we now need geometric economic growth for the average person's standard of living to remain STATIC. If the economy doesn't grow, the average person's standard of living begins to fall. Economic growth by percentages in real dollars every year is a pyramid scam and is fundamentally unsustainable, so we're basically screwed.

What's happening is that people at the bottom of the educational and skills ladder are being squeezed out of the economy. Their jobs, formerly decent-paying middle class jobs, are lost in the manufacturing sector and not replaced. In most western nations we're generating a growing and permanent underclass of working poor and chronically unemployed persons marginalized by the economy in this way. They ultimately end up in the low-paying service sector, the underground economy or on welfare- or on the streets.

Statistics show that the rich are getting richer and the rest are either staying the same or getting poorer in most western nations- as if you needed statistics to prove that! As the old song says, "Them that's got shall have, them that's not shall lose, so the Bible says, and it STILL is news!" There's an increase in the net standard of living during times of (geometric) economic growth, but the benefit of this growth and the pain of the recessions isn't being shared equally by any stretch of the imagination.

As manufacturing jobs move to the developing world, you can expect to see yet more formerly middle-class people slip into lower class status. That means more crime and more societal decay. Welcome to the 21st century in the western world- too bad it's not a brighter picture.

 

[Tobalcane]

Man it sounds like you need a vacation if you are thinking about this stuff…

“I meant the nice utopian kind where people can do what they want without having to "work" just to get by.”

I don’t think technology can change the have and have not society to create a utopian ( I think that is what you are trying to say?). It seems that the more technology we have the greater the gap between the poor and the rich. I can see this with the computer. Most poor people do not have a computer in their house where most middle class and up do. When the middle class and up have their kids, they (kids) will be computer literate and in the future have a better job. Where as for the poor who do not have a computer, their kids will loose out on better jobs because they can not use a computer.


Go Mechanical Engineering
Tobalcane

 

[wes616]

I was thinking that if all this comes to pass, maybe there would be a geat market for someone who could do things by hand.

Maybe I should learn to shoe horses (and other blacksmithery practices... I mean my wife has been talking about how she can't find any GOOD cast iron, to cook with). It may bring a fierce dollar in the not so far off future...

Wes C.
------------------------------
There are no engineers in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent engineer would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Oh I enjoy my work (ME represent!) it's just an intellectual exercise to ask the question.

rb1957 - You are implying that the creativity is not inherent in the idea, only in the manual labor to achieve physical results. I think they are quite discrete - many engineers will never get their hands dirty in the slightest, while still creating things far beyond the state of the art.

Tobalcane and moltenmetal - You both seem to be on the same side, but in disagreement with Slugger926 and TheTick. Is there a net increase or decrease of jobs?

Independently: Is there a net increase or decrease in the Quality of each job? (opens the floodgates)

wes616 - I think it'll end up one way (blacksmiths) or the other (mind-prototyping) Or will it be both, between the have-nots and haves?

 

[rb1957]

i think technology changes jobs; losing some, gaining others. 50 years ago we had typing pools, and we didn't have web app designers

 

[TheTick]

It seems that the more technology we have the greater the gap between the poor and the rich.

200 years ago, only the wealthiest had indoor plumbing.

 

[moltenmetal]

There are more jobs, full stop. We've managed to move from one member of the family working to support the family's needs to having two people doing so. That necessarily means more jobs or else the unemployment rate as currently measured would be enormous. The job increase has arisen because of fundamentally unsustainable geometric economic growth. If that's our model going forward, the planet and all who live on it are toast.

The question is: with all these extra people working, are families more or less prosperous than they were before? I'm not talking about pre-industrial revolution here, I'm talking about comparing current conditions to those experienced in the same country fifty years ago, where the predominant model was one person working to support the needs of a larger family than is today's norm.

Yeah, I know that our consumption patterns and the relative pricing of goods have changed- as has our entire standard of what is "normal" consumption. It's a tough comparison.

Just what is a "standard of living" anyway? Personally, I'd define it as the percentage of a person's income which must be devoted to the basics: food, shelter, essential services like health care and education for your kids, and access to a means to make the income to pay for these things. In some societies you pay for all these things directly, whereas in others you pay for some of these things indirectly through taxation.

I'd argue that the standard of living of the AVERAGE person measured in this way has actually decreased over the past fifty years. The middle class has been steadily shrinking.

The top 10% of the population in Western societies has been thriving. They've been raking in money hand over fist.

Capitalism and the so-called "free market" are excellent ways to run an economy, distribute goods and advance technology- far better at doing these things than anything else we've tried. But these mechanisms are p*ss poor at distributing wealth: there's a natural tendency for money to make money, and for the powerless to be exploited for the financial gain of the powerful. You need government intervention in the form of taxation and spending and regulation to keep the system stable. That becomes more and more essential as the ability to generate wealth is centralized into fewer and fewer hands as a result of technological advancement.

Fortunately, the free market is pouring money into the developing world at the moment to exploit its low labour cost. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the profit from those endeavours is going into the hands of people who already have too much. Garments made for a dollar are sold for thirty at retail. The difference goes into the pockets of numerous middle-men, not into the hands of the Third World seamstress who did the work- nor into the hands of the poor First World garment worker who used to sew those garments and is now collecting welfare or working at McDonalds for minimum wage.

 

[epoisses]

hi moltenmetal,
Agree with your posting to a certain extent, but want to add an element which you may not agree with:
Money is just an intermediate thing, IMHO economics is easier understandable (at least for me as an economic ignorant) if you don't consider money (this may sound bizarre but watch this). Everybody has certain talents and can do certain work. Everybody has a certain ratio "value added" over "salary gained" which remains more or less constant with increasing standard of living. A chinese kid who puts a T-shirt together adds not much value and does not make a lot of money. A CEO who helps a multinational from the minuses into the pluses creates a fortune and makes sure he makes one as well.
Now within one country there a people with higher ratios (the "useful" ones - sorry guys this is not a pretty story) and the less useful ones (the unemployed are an extreme example - I warned you this is not pretty). Imagine you're a French sock-knitter (real-life example). The value you add has always been the same since you've started (not sure if this is true actually but I won't kill my example at this stage, if you keep looking at the sock not its price it's true), but your salary has increased (don't look at the number but look at the more and more sophisticated things you buy). Your ratio has dropped. You are trying to buy more and more sophisticated things/services while giving nothing more sophisticated in return. You have become "less useful" compared to the other people who have managed to add more value because they took on more sophisticated jobs. In fact you are being outweighted by Chinese or Indians who add exactly the same value (make the same sock) against much less salary: a much better ratio.
64k$ question: why would any government protect "not so useful" contributors to their economy instead of pushing them to become more useful?

 

[GregLocock]

I dunno. This internet thango seems to me to be a quantum leap in quality of life,and is essentially free.

In theory I could sit on my yacht (if I had a yacht), or at least in my back garden, and run an engineering business from that location. or even a social life, of sorts.

So while we may not attend church socials and bitch about the home-made cakes so much, we can meet like minded individuals world wide, and bitch about, well, frankly, everything.



Cheers

Greg Locock

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[ziggi]

This cycle of richer becoming richer and poor becoming poorer has been going on for centuries.
If you forecast this scenario into the future, you will have a small minority of happy ultra-rich and and a huge majority of angry ultra-poor, all it takes is a spark and you have a revolution. For example the French and Russian revolutions. The only difference now is that the upper classes understand that they need to fleece us slowly so that they can be comfortable for as long as possible. All the masses need is a martyr to start the revolution, another assasination of Rasputin if you will. The masses nearly had it in regards to Martin Luther King, however he applied primarily to the black populace, who were completely unsupported by the content white middle class of the time.
That being said, a revolution does very little to distribute the wealth, it only ejects some upper-classmen from their positions and catapults a few lucky lower classmen into the upper class ranks, but it creates a content populace, and leads to the formation of a new middle class, effectively restarting the cycle.
I figure that north-america still has about 200 or 300 or even 400 years to go before this happens.


Wes,
As for more traditional jobs like farriers (blacksmiths) and skillet makers. My mother-in-law works with race horses and I know for a fact that a farrier makes very good money, but you've got to watch out for those horse hooves. Actually a horse groom (the person who preps horses before a race and cleans and cools them down after a race)at a race track can make as much as a junior engineer for about 30 hours of work a week. A good horse trainer.....let's just say that if I tell you how much they make you'll be peeved off that you went to university.

 

[epoisses]

@greg

Agree, I think internet will turn out to be a greater step forward for humanity than the car. What made man develop himself much faster than the endlessly slow process of evolution is culture or information exchange, and information exchange has never been like it is today.

Regarding the richer vs the poorer, come on moltenmetal and ziggi, do you really think the poor are worse off nowadays than in the middle ages or the age of slavery? Show me data!

 

[ziggi]

epoisses,
I never said that the poor are worse off now than back in the old days. I stated that it all works in a cycle. Using that a comparison is flawed, we are discussing socio-economics not quality of life, the rich of the old days were comparably worse off than those of today.