"Humans Need Not Apply"

[youtube]http://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU.*?[/youtube]

Were heading into a future, where the jobs we can do, will no longer require us. Where there will be machines, some slower, some faster, but far cheaper and more efficient replacing us. They already exist, they are already replacing people, the effects just haven't been wide spread enough for most people to piece this much together yet.

The video explains this in much greater detail, and I figure this is something worth spreading. The message of the video, is not that we need to stop advancing, but that we need to discuss what this means for the 10's of millions of people who will be loosing jobs in the next 10-20 years, through absolutely no fault of their own, and what we should do to stop this from completely destroying our economy. Absolutely no one (who needs to be) is having this conversation, and waiting till it happens to you is a damaging mentality. So I feel their is a need to spread this around because this involves everyone who works.

Technology is advancing far faster than we can become accustom too, and yet, no one is really bothering to determine the outcome of these advances on our society.

(I know, I feel really bad for lifting a lot of phrases from CGPgrey, but they were really powerful, to me, and I wanted to feel a little bit of that power...)

As a preface, we have nearly double the workforce now because the great depression was a time before women's work, so rather than assume that 25% is the kill zone for economic collapse, I'd rather that 40-50% be the dead zone. Moving on

I think there's 2 (possibly 3) points to the automation revolution that the article doesn't mention:
1) Free education (which while not hosted in America, is hosted in places like Canada) which can allow humans to research indefinitely in order to come up with more fields of work. This may sound less solid of because robots can do simple research functions, etc, etc. However, until the process to perfect a robots learning gets beyond the human mind, there will always be jobs to do research indefinitely.
2) Space travel creates a greater amount of space and a greater pool of resources to from which to spread out more jobs, so it won't matter if 1 person overseeing 30 cashier robots replaces 30 cashiers if there's 30 times more stores in the sprawl of space.
3) Finally, if we can't get more jobs (because it may not be possible) then there will have to be revolts do to worker discouragement. The wealth gap will inevitably get too large to be acceptable if machines replace humans in too many jobs. If I'm not mistaken, it would be the prime set up for a Marxist revolution (because one 1% group would hold all means of production using automation, smashing the rest into the dirt in terms of income inequality). If that were to happen (not guaranteed; maybe people will just grovel and die without any other job to which they are qualified), then with state control of all means of production, human employment could be at an extremely low hours in order to include everyone in employment and resources would be spread evenly due to large surpluses of food.
Unfortunately the usual problems with communism will arise (how do you prevent corruption, etc, etc) but regardless of those future problems, that seems like it would be the case.

I could also talk about environmental effects on the human population but I feel like that sort of stuff is taken less seriously than the prior points. The point is that I don't think that there will be a solution, given that everything from the video is true.

The list is 33 of the most common of the "100s of jobs" (for US I assume), and of the 33, they are all replaceable now or in the near future. To which, of the listed, are simply 45% of the work force. So more than what's on the list, more than 45%, is at threat to being replaced.

With "double the work force" just means, double the amount of people working those jobs, those jobs are still just as vulnerable, the only difference is how many need to be replaced and how long that will take.



Can you explain the free education a bit? I'd like to know more.

In the last hundred years, we haven't come up with many, to my understanding, but maybe with focus towards...

Ross King's Adam, yeast researching robot.



Seeing how much money it cost, how extreme the environments of space and sea are, how fragile and quick to err humans are, how long machines can function, ect...

Example, Tenchi or Outlaw Star, where they had stores/facilities in the middle space... psychologically, leaving a human in such a place for extended periods of time is dangerous, also requires constant food, oxygen, liquids, and heating, while a machine could recharge using solar panels on it's facility and wireless energy charging, if it moves around, like wireless phone chargers. MIT is even working on bringing about Nikola Tesla vision of wireless energy transmissions. Maintaining a machine in an non-hospitable environment would be far easier than a human. Machines have made it so much farther, Curiosity and Voyager 1.



CGP Grey kind of covers this, with the Unions in history who resisted machines taking their jobs, but always lost. Unions doing such things normally only garners contempt more than anything else from the population who just wants their service, or at least in the US (Bart and Hostess recent union strikes). I don't know about the status of other countries in regards to unions, but they have little overall power when the workers are replaceable.

I have the feeling, if people revolt on a large scale, in one country, the manufactures would simply turn to another country, such as China, India, or Africa.

The inequality was something I had thought about for awhile... The rich still need people to have money, if no one can buy the product the machines are making, there's no point in buying the machines, material, and electricity involved in making the product in the first place... But I doubt anyone, who is in those positions of influence, would even consider this... The consensus never seems to be about how would everything balance out, but how best to turn a profit. (I have the scary notion of an Elysium like future stuck in my head, just with less human workers.)

Politically, the US government would take the side of the companies, they have been for a long while, but more so in recent years, giving companies numerous rights and immunities. Things that, for awhile, I had been racking my brain to figure out "why give". I'm really hoping these two topics are not directly associated with one another behind closed doors.



I think global warming in general is having an affect far bigger than these machines alone could do, I'm sure they can contribute, but if you want to look towards environment, I think looking into global warming research would tell you quite a bit already...

6th mass extinction kicked off by people.

We need to dump the 40+\hr week paradigm and the mentality that supports it. Also the consumerist style produce all you can mentality. Producing only to meet needs (+10% or so for reserve on luxuries and with many years stored food) would curtail quite a few environmental issues by itself.

Right now most of the extra man hours labour is going to fuel all night shopping and burgers and longer hours on meaningless, unnecessary jobs.

Cutting one adult per family out of the workforce AND making the work week 32 hours would normalize the problem, but that can't happen because we're still in the industrial revolution mentality where production is the key indicator of financial power on a world scale and everyone needs to work as hard as they can.


And if automation eventually gives us two day work weeks with more time for family, art, culture, self-betterment, and recreation, that would not be a bad thing.

Wages would either have to go up or the cost of living go down, tremendously. Both of which are highly controversial topics to the ones who give out salary and the ones who charge for... all in conjunction too.

Supply and demand economics applies to the labour force as well. Part of why most workers, even professionals, have decreasing wages relative to cost of living and very little negotiating power, is that the labour market is saturated and then some. More people have degrees so degrees are worth far less, less people are needed for jobs so jobs are worth less.

In a situation where there is a labour shortage instead of an unemployment rate worked negotiating power increases, especially relative to their skill and established reliability.

The free market would correct this to a livable wage in ways that raising mandatory minimums and other direct regulations could never do.

You're still looking at a situation those who own the means of production will realize the nature of an object too, they of course prefer labour, like any other cost, to be as cheap and readily available as possible.

It sounds like your saying that the free market will match wages with the cost of living if people can not afford the cost of living, but the free market hasn't done so given the time it has been given to do so in recent years. While unemployment rose so did the price of living, housing, gas, water, electricity, food, cable/internet/cell(any phone). Unemployment dropped, since the worst of it, in recent years, in the US, but the prices still continue to rise. The solution for most service/housing providers seems to be to squeeze more from others who can afford, if they can't get enough from the ones they're already charging, pushing many people off the ledge of affordability. As opposed, to fixing the price to a point where all can participate by being able to afford.

While I realize cable can be struck off my above list, but the other "non-essentials", cellphones and internet, have become necessities in many parts of the US, but are still not acknowledge in the cost of living (or to my understanding, is not).

I'd agree minimum wage bears lesser significance when there's a shortage of labor. A, well informed, employee can negotiate their own wage. But when there's a shortage of jobs, without regulation and minimum wage, China shows me good examples of how bad off the worker can be and how the free market doesn't drop to accommodate for those who fall beneath the ability to support themselves by the set standards, but instead focuses more on those who can keep afloat.

The market, as it is without any interference as well assuming it itself stays as much in the US as it currently is, strikes me as though it will just continue to raise prices from those who can afford, as it has been, while machines continue to push more people out of jobs, with those workers ending up forced to let go of the life styles they lived for less expensive ones. And for a great amount, poverty worst than the the current Detroit.

I mean fully subsidized education so that going to college, given the ability, is free. This would be able to give access to a general collective of minds to help research more, especially in nuanced, un-automate-able fields like economics and political science (and for all I know, it could be what solves the problem in the first place).
And while it's true that in chemical fields, robots can do a lot of automated tasks, until we have a fully functional artificial intelligence, we can still use researchers in the fields to help theorize and find newer discoveries.

I'll take your point on 2. At first I was being semi satirical because there doesn't seem to be a way to cull the rising force of jobless people following the automations.



It could be that the reason behind it is that there isn't a high enough unemployment rate to coerce the masses. It's not merely about being out of work, it's being in a position where all of the chips have fallen into a single-definable group's hands. The occupy movement may be a glimpse of what is to come were the unemployment rates to skyrocket.


On a separate note, I forgot one thing that may be a flaw in the automation argument. How do we know that there will be enough resources to make the bots?
Perhaps for rich countries, it would not be an issue and the investment would be worth it to them, but some companies may not be able to afford that investment and thus would have to resort to human labor.

I'm not saying that. You should perhaps re-read what I wrote.



This is entirely expected based on my assertions.




It hasn't dropped substantially, even if you agree with metrics that say that it has there is nothing like a labour shortage.



Price fixing without wage fixing will just drive wages down to compensate. Fixing both prices and wages is essentially communism.


China has no labour shortage. Quite the opposite labour is in abundance and thus is even more horribly devalued than here.



How can a believer in science still be a Luddite?

Increased productivity leading to poverty is nonsense...

What I have said needs to be done IS market interference, it's controlling the labour supply to forcibly increase it's value. It's minimally invasive (we already do it, just the regulations haven't been updated in far too long) and potently effective.

Machines are scary. Now excuse me, I'm going to go shoot all my household
Appliances.

On a serious note, it's only a mater of time before we crash as a civilization, and machines become obsolete simply because no one can operate them.

Yes cause (Terminator anyone) but also cause with inflation that 2 days most likely pay your bills or food so the art, culture, and recreation get put on back burners cause people need to worry how to get by.

Machines will not be able to do every job so to get scared of them thinking they will cost most people jobs is stupid. We are not close enough yet to where there will be robots putting stuff on shelves. There will always be certain jobs humans will have.

My opinion I think JGPS stated is basically lower work weeks. The problem with that is what do you set it at to still allow people to pay bills? 32 hours is full time right now and 40 is just the max time before overtime. Also if you lower people's hours do you need to give them raises to make up for that lost time? There are to many more concerns on solving the economy work situation and worrying about the Terminator isn't going to help either.

You seem to misunderstand how inflation works in conjunction with my proposed solutions... Wages vs cost of living is what I'm talking about, and that ignores inflation because it deals with ratios rather than flat numbers.



The ongoing Problem here is the idea that we arbitrarily want the jobs machines can do simply for the sake of jobs existing... This has been a problem of perception since the industrial revolution.





Humans are nessisary for many jobs. Divide those nessisary jobs out better and their value will increase. Everyone will be able to pay their bills the same as or better than now.



The problem now is too many people are competing for the same jobs, and that competition drives the value of labour down... If you create a labour scarcity the relative value of labour increases, and if that scarcity persists then workers wind up with a bigger share of profits.

So what I'm proposing entails both less work hours and more buying power for labourers in the long run. But EVERYONE must be on board with it or else the people working multiple jobs will keep the market low. Thus it has to be legally regulated.

If workers are too scares work can't get done and industry shuts down, but we're not talking about going that low.

Didn't read your proposed plan...but inflation affects cost of living so it really cannot be ignored.



How would you create labor scarcity though? Labor scarcity is basically just having a job market that not enough candidates are qualified for. That can work in countries that are lower in education, but places like USA it would basically be impossible cause there are so many people both from USA and outside USA that can take a job. So how would you create it in a higher educated society that can have upwards to 100 people for 1 job.

I don't think a fully automated society will be a bad thing. If by that time we come across new resources that will replace fossil fuels, then humans won't need to work. We'd finally reach the point where humans live in a utopia. However, if we're still using fossil fuels by then, then it'll spell doom to modern society (even without a fully automated economy, we'll still be in trouble).

Wages vs cost of living deals with ratios, while inflation deals with static values. I'm not really sure where to start explaining this though becasue I'm not sure how much of this you get. The static values that inflation represents don't represent actual buying power in any tangible way, so they're not really worth focusing on in economics as much as one would think. Inflation vs wages essentially tells you how much wages have decreased, as (per Austrian Economics anyway) inflation is essentially a tax on wages and wage earners.

Inflation increases the numbers used to express the cost of living, but only actually affects the actual cost of living so much as it outpaces wage growth. If your wages go up 2% in a year that has 2% inflation your cost of living stays the same. In a similar way when you calculate wages vs cost of living inflation is effectively ignored as it's effects are implied in the calculation along with everything else 'the cost of living' entails.

So, the idea is that by restricting the labour supply companies will have to pay better wages compared to cost of living to keep staff, regardless of what inflation is at. Even in a case of hyperinflation the companies will still have to keep up with it to keep their staff.

They will have to give a more reasonable share to their workers, while being able to hoard less.



By limiting work hours initially, and reducing the number of people required too and expected to work in the long run. This was the whole original idea.

In that way more jobs on most levels will open up (because you need that % more of each professional, and skilled labour is not readily replaced by technology) while excessive low end jobs will become unprofitable and disappear.



No, it's actually just having not enough workers. It's actually totally independent of the education level.


No, it works better where more people are educated, becasue they can more readily fill the newly created openings in skilled labour jobs, where the education level is lower it takes longer to adjust as people develop skills.

But clearly unchecked cheap labour immigration would have to be cut off, as would unlimited unrealized outsourcing.

Actual immigration of skilled people that just want to come overseas would continue as always, but it thoroughly disgusts me that cheap labour is brought in from overseas with no skills or real care for my country (though I'm not American) while freinds of mine who moved here with their own money on their own power just because they wanted too have to fight for their ability to immigrate at every turn.



29.2 hour work year would keep that job fully staffed and functional between those 100 people.

But no, you don't have 100 people for 1 nessisary job in any society, anywhere. Even where you have 1.5-2 skilled people per job too many people can't get appropriate work, that's more realistically the situation we're dealing with. So, halving the workforce (more realistically, reducing about 30%) and reducing work by one day a week would balance it out nicely.

Education in Canada isn't free, if it was I'd have gone to collage.
I do wonder what will happen to an economy when most of its people have no jobs, I imagine they'll destroy all the machines and start anew. Or the machines will destroy us.
Either way, the future looks very bleak.

The Matrix wasn't actually a fictional movie, it was a documentary. DUN DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUN!

Human labor will always be cheaper than investing in a machine that depreciates over time.

I know this is funny even though I don't intend to read it.

keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes keystrokes

Technology will make our lives easier, but it cannot replace all human functions.

If you have watched I, robot enough, you will know what I mean.

In reality, though, it is a possibility. But then again, humans don't require electricity / fossil fuel to work.