Modern Times
Yet more on this topic, this time from Gary Marcus at the New Yorker:
For centuries, it has always been the case that some new jobs are eliminated by technology, while others are created. It’s hard to parse out exactly the role that technology has played, but as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee note in their superb recent book, “Race Against the Machine,” over the last decade throughout the economy, there has been a drop in the employment-to-population ratio and a drop in median wages, and many of the people who lost jobs couldn’t find new ones that paid as well as the ones that they lost.
…And as machines continue to get smarter, cheaper, and more effective, our options dwindle. Secretaries have been replaced by word processors and accountants by QuickBooks. As John Markoff explained last year, in an article entitled “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” blue-collar and white-collar jobs are both threatened. Even new-fangled information-economy jobs like I.T. departments are now endangered by systems like Amazon’s back-end A.W.S. infrastructure, which provides one-stop cloud-based solutions where a team of on-site computer wizards were once needed. With advances in both hardware and software, the time between the invention of a job and its automated replacement is getting shorter.
…Anything that can be automated will, but where we can create new things, there still may be a niche for us to fill.
It’s that “may” that gets me.
Marcus continues:
It’s not too early to start preparing for that future. Curricula that foster creativity—by developing children’s intrinsic motivation for originality, encouraging their intellectual risk-taking and cultivating their metacognitive ability to self-reflect—might be a good place to start.
Well, whether that can do the trick in time is, to say the least, doubtful, but it beats fretting about a declining birthrate or, worse still, arguing for mass immigration to fill a non-existent labor gap.
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May '10
Re: Modern Times
Andrew Stuttaford
Marcus continues:
Curricula that fosters the ability to read, write and speak coherently, follow directions, and cipher to the rule of nines would be an even better place to start. Add in learning to show up on time every day.
Until we reliably accomplish that very minimalistic skill set there's no point stressing about "metacognitive ability to self-reflect."
Jul '10
Re: Modern Times
I think that workforce automation has less to do with technology than it does with harmful wage laws. Cashiers were not necsesarily replaced by self-checkout machines because of the advance in technology, but that because you had to pay an employee more and more for a low-skill job, the market demanded some sort of solution in the form of automation.
Aug '11
Re: Modern Times
The good news is that the younger generations are already on the case. Check it out.
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/12/23/with-growth-of-hacker-scouting-more-kids-learn-to-tinker-npr/
I talk to young people (15-25) all the time and they love the makers movement. They are cobbling together projects with open source kits and software in amazing ways--and having a blast doing it.
Sep '10
Re: Modern Times
Well, you certainly won't find that on offer from the 70's neo Marxist education school curricula currently on offer. Musicians sweat their scales before becoming "creative" and students who don't learn grammar are crippled as thinkers, as Theodore Dalrymple so balefully mentioned in one of his essays.
Aug '10
Re: Modern Times
I've been nailing up sheetrock and also programming a computer model of dementia, and I don't think robots would do either for me. "Anything that can be automated will"? No, I am confident that The New Yorker will continue to pay dumb flesh to write this stuff.
Aug '10
Re: Modern Times
Andrew Stuttaford
The way to say this in economics jargon is, industries where productivity gains are a function of labor will be automated first; industries where productivity gains are a function of (human) judgement will be automated next; and industries where productivity is a function of capital allocation will most strongly resist automation.
Why care about productivity? Well, historically speaking, wage increases were generally a function of productivity gains. If those gains come more from capital/technology than from labor/workers, wages stagnate.
In an increasingly automated world, the primary source of increased income would come from investments, not wages per unit of labor. Putting monetary capital at risk provides direct, more stable gains than building human capital, which carries inherent risk merely by existing.
In short, even if you keep a job, your wages will never grow the same as they did before the last technology boom. And the rich will continue to get richer, not because of any unfairness in capitalism or the political system, but simply because of how they earn wealth.
Aug '10
Re: Modern Times
By the way, creative destruction is inextricably linked to the system's financial health. Technology leverages capital to create productivity; but American capital is horribly over-leveraged, and the debt overhang will reduce any further growth that could conceivably lead to new jobs.
The only thing propping up labor/job markets is consumption. But that is also driven by debt, and suffers similar problems:
When consumption is no longer satisfied by labor, and consumers can't get more wealth from debt... where will the money come from to fuel some new job sector?
Nov '10
Re: Modern Times
I get your point.
But even a low-skill employee cannot exist on $0.10 / hour which is what I pay my robot.
We have a new paradigm here. I don't know what should be done with the low-skilled citizens.
Edited on January 2, 2013 at 4:14amJun '11
Re: Modern Times
The tech jobs they're talking about aren't "new-fangled" and haven't been for years. Why should I pay $50/hr for an insolent and barely competent inhouse DBA when I can go to [fill in the country or firm] for 1/3 the price? Dilbert isn't a comic strip, it's a reality show.
Re: Modern Times
Andrew: The thing about immigration in all this is not only that it's presented as the solution to a non-existent labor shortage, but also that it undermines the remaining wage-earning opportunities of those workers least able to adapt to rapid technological change.
I'm sure everyone can, to some degree, be encouraged in "intellectual risk-taking" and have their "metacognitive ability to self-reflect" cultivated (whatever that means). But policymakers seem to forget that half the population is, by definition, below the median in IQ and in "metacognitive ability to self-reflect". Importing low-skilled immigrants sabotages their position in the labor market for those jobs suitable to them which have not yet been automated.
Even if libertarians don't see it as wrong to deliberately screw their fellow countrymen through the discretionary immigration program, it should at least be clear that when increasing numbers of low-skilled workers are losing the race against both the machine and the immigrant, the vote for statist solutions can only increase.
Mar '11
Re: Modern Times
I think machines improving productivity but making the peoples labor worthless that were replaced, is B.S. I don't curse ever but I really want to curse the idea. Common Senses destroy the possibility of the idea. Human labor worthless yay right what universe do you live in. Any computer programer can tell you the limitations on machines.
There will always be millions of task that humans can do that no program can ever do.
Now machines destroying jobs and no low thought or low creativity jobs replacing them, that I believe.
Apr '11
Re: Modern Times
You're welcome to read my take on this very subject in detail here: I based my New Year's resolution and blog post on it.
We've got what we voted for -- a political economy where the makers have to produce enough supply and income for the 70% taxes to service debt and the welfare state and still have enough left over to justify even playing by the rules. Forget allies abroad, by the way. Israel and Taiwan are surely doomed.
Instead of dismissing this as the nightmare I wish not to be, I have accepted the challenge: I'm going to a project and inquiry basis with standards-based grading in my classroom this very semester.
To those of you who want to see a return to the "old standards": everyone can do that stuff, and it's not enough to even start solving this problem.
Try this idea for size: "education" panels picking out the future "makers" and dismissing the future "takers" from school so that we can focus resources on those who will be productive. Watch for Obama and his ilk to push for nationalized federal education next.
This is the paradigm we voted for ... twice.
Sep '10
Re: Modern Times
I'm trying to shoehorn metacognitive ability to self reflect into a PelosiPaloozaPigInAPoke that passes a 6,536 page health care law that no one can be bothered reading until after its passed.
Nov '10
Re: Modern Times
I'm deeply involved in advocacy in Math Ed advocacy and recognize this immediately. It's coded language used by opponents of skills development, mastery and independence through education, when they want to sell the concept to a suspicious public.
Have you heard about the "Math Wars"? Google it and/or check out the site I founded here at WISE Math with a group of other mathematicians or one of our many American counterparts like NYCHold (and watch the two excellent videos prominently featured on their site). 200 words is too short to bring you up to snuff, but if you wonder what Bill Ayers was talking about concerning their unfettered access to the classroom, this is it.
It is about elimination of basic reading, grammar and analytical skills, the standard algorithms of arithmetic, history, basic science; a false dichotomy between "skill" and "understanding" that has already seriously harmed a generation -- and it does not foster "creativity"!
Don't be duped. Get informed!
Nov '12
Re: Modern Times
One of the more interesting things that is taking root among the younger, technology-immersed younger generations, is that they are eschewing the value of property rights. To be sure there is little respect for paying others for the fruits of their labor, they expect people to let them use their ideas and creations for free, or almost for free. They also, though, seem much more willing to give away their own creations for others to use as well. Open source technology and the commoditizing of intellectual capital through crowd sourcing, is dramatically reframing and redefining traditional notions of fair value.
How will this change our economy?
Is high volume and low margins really a sustainable model for growth?
Does it present a model for solving social problems in ways that bypass the state?
Is the thrill of being ubiquitous and recognized for creating something everyone wants rewarding enough that people are willing to forego the big pay day?
I don't know, but I think traditional notions about how the economy works and where jobs come from is about to be turned on its ear. Technology isn't just revolutionizing productivity, it's reshaping the traditional nature of capitalism.
Edited on January 2, 2013 at 6:10amDec '12
Re: Modern Times
Funny, about 20 years ago, I listened to a person advanced in my field (industrial procurement) tell me that right about now, my job would have been eliminated (function done by a computer), and if I wanted to go further in my career (I was just starting out), I'd have to acquire new, more "strategic" skills. Well, it's 20 years later, and not only has my job not been eliminated, I'm basically performing the same kind of tactical activities, along with many others in my and other companies. We have better software tools to help us (although the company I work for is just now converting from and old DOS-based ERP system to one that is Windows based), but our job hasn't changed much. The job title Buyer is alive and well, as much as the "supply management" gurus have attempted to eliminate it. Smaller organizations still exist, and so do we buyers.
Nov '10
Re: Modern Times
Consider "metacognition". What is that, you ask? It means "thinking about what you're thinking while you're thinking". Self-reflection, etc.
Well that sounds innocuous enough, doesn't it? Even ... helpful. Agreed.
But observe it in practice. What it means is that your child is not taught to add numbers down columns (or similar procedures for subtraction, multiplication, and long division). They are supposed to "invent their own procedures" -- the formal term is "strategies". If you're a teacher or parent of young children you've heard that word a lot lately!
It means that your grade 3 child, when he gives "14" as the answer to the teachers question "6+8=?" must answer the follow-up: "Show the class your 'strategy'". Saying "I just know this one" is not good enough. A student found adding down columns may be scolded. A note may go home (not joking!), because "that's not her own strategy. Please stop harming your child by teaching her 'rote' procedures".
In grade 5 your child must perform mental gymnastics to solve 23+38. In grade 9 they must navigate a metacognitive jungle to multiply (1+2x+x^2) by (3-5x).
Smarter? No. Dumber.
Apr '11
Re: Modern Times
Mark Krikorian:
I'm sure everyone can, to some degree, be encouraged in "intellectual risk-taking" and have their "metacognitive ability to self-reflect" cultivated (whatever that means). But policymakers seem to forget that half the population is, by definition, below the median in IQ and in "metacognitive ability to self-reflect". Importing low-skilled immigrants sabotages their position in the labor market for those jobs suitable to them which have not yet been automated.
And importing high skilled workers just lowers the earning potential for the right half of the IQ curve. So all those Republicans advocating giving green cards to foreign PhDs isn't that great either for American workers. In fact probably allowing people to come here to do anything other than study hurts the job prospects of Americans in some way.
I think though the answer for low skilled workers may rest in the creation of new grunt work. I strongly believe that in research there is a lot of labor potential for people willing and able to perform dexterous and repeated actions. So much of bench top science is just menial labor, most of it done by people better employed in analysis and design.
Apr '11
Re: Modern Times
So long as people have needs or desires that require humans to satisfy them, there will be a demand for the labors of others. The day that there is no demand for the labors of others is the day that we all have all our material needs satisfied. I'm not sure that a: I look on that prospect with horror or that b: it looks like it's going to arrive any time soon.
Valiuth
And importing high skilled workers just lowers the earning potential for the right half of the IQ curve. So all those Republicans advocating giving green cards to foreign PhDs isn't that great either for American workers. In fact probably allowing people to come here to do anything other than study hurts the job prospects of Americans in some way.
Assuming that the cognitive distribution of demanded labor remains the same as population increases through immigration, the importation of high skilled workers increases the earning potential for the left half. This is true even before considering the fact that doctors, lawyers, managers and bankers serving them working for less is hardly an unalloyed harm from the perspective of the American worker.
Aug '12
Re: Modern Times
One thing to remember about automation is that it's a diminishing returns relationship. The first robot you hire does something mindlessly routine, like the bolt tightening bit from modern times. You can keep automating processes, but each time your gains are a little less. The tasks become less obvious and the machine gets harder to program.
You say QuickBooks is taking away jobs? fine. If I had half a dozen accounting jobs a century ago, QuickBooks takes away four. It'll be loads more expensive to take away that fifth, and that sixth job is never gonna be automated.
You want a more concrete example? Welding. You can program robots to weld things in assembly lines (Harley Davidson does for building bike frames, for example). But you always need welders for repairing things. Large things made of steel are expensive, so much so that it's almost always cheaper to fix one than to buy a new one. When you're fixing a broken something you can't control when and where and how it needs a weld, so you pay for someone's independent human judgement to hold that torch.