But if a driver has to be in the car, then no job is lost.

Some recent articles discussing driver-less cars.

http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-driverless-car-in-pittsburgh-review-photos-2016-9/#to-try-the-cars-we-lined-up-at-ubers-advanced-technologies-center-in-the-strip-district-of-pittsburgh-a-small-neighborhood-on-the-allegheny-river-with-nearby-warehouses-the-atc-is-tucked-under-an-overpass-for-a-freight-train-keeping-it-secluded-1

http://www.businessinsider.com/autonomous-cars-bridges-2016-8

http://www.businessinsider.com/autonomous-car-limitations-2016-8

There is kind of a bind with automation. If computers got good enough to not need people. If I was incharge maybe; otherwise, not going to happen, and this is why without me they haven't overcame the fact they can'tdeal with new variables. This is always going to happen requiring a manual override. If this is fully automated, and it was planned for it would regularly shut down sending a signal to the president of the company everyday. If there is no It, or whatever for that matter. Then he wouldn't be able to diagnose the problem not nowing who to call, or maybe this would be the new kind of president skill set. No way to describe a unforseen problem. We are going to still need people to do things the big people don't want to do.

Yes small business does seem to be the solution, and does seem to be a solution for other problems to. Framchising does seem to cause problems. I think small business; not, franchising, but bamks discourage small business, but prefer franchises.

Now let's assume that 50% of the work force is put out of work without some kind of supplementing income. SSI for everyone wether you qualify or not. First supplementing income would cause a lot of young people to stop working shrinking the work force. Without supplementing income their would be no demand for goods and services. This would almost stop. Without money coming in then businesses would go out of business. Causing another great depression. If small businesses were incouraged then they couldn't affordautomation, so this could still maintain the workforce. After the depression automation would be considered a society killer, and we would go back to before.

Or we could up the entertainment, or art industry where the place to work for humans is this. There are several ways the mind can take you here.

Yes, I noticed this after posting. I was mainly looking at the fact that towards the bottom, it keeps getting thinner, without noting that it was still thicker than the thin part of the 49-67 segment. It's much harder to calculate having solely a graph though.  

the US retirement consists of two things that are still viable. There used to be a 3rd, Defined Benefits, but it's basically reserved for government employees and those who are part of massive unions at this point. Social Security, and Defined Contribution. Social security was originally designed to cover people who were long past the average age of mortality, primarily to take care of widows and those who were so extremely old that they simply couldn't work at all. It's a defined benefits package that gives just enough to where they can live modestly in an area with inexpensive costs. The only requirement is a certain, relatively small amount of work through one's life from which social security taxes were taken. This can be gotten early, but at a greatly reduced rate. If someone retires early it's usually best for them to just live off their other savings until they are 67.

The second is Defined Contribution. Generally, you negotiate this with your employer. You put in a certain amount, and your company puts in a percentage of this amount. It is stored in a mix of various financial instruments tax-free (for the standard 401k) that starts much more aggressive, then is transitioned to safer assets as you get closer to retirement. How much you can afford and how early you can retire is based entirely on how much money you accumulate in this account. 

Though, I wasn't referring to early retirement when I was posting, just standard retirement at 67. 

That link is right though. A lot of people, myself included, are terrible with money. This is why the companies cheerlead people towards contributing to the retirement plan several times per year.

Following the post yesterday, I started thinking about the original post and the 25-50% claim in general. 

It used two main things as examples. Amazon and Walmart. Two companies that are extremely aggressive about cost cutting. They don't follow the norm of US businesses when it comes to laying people off.

My own experience in the area of Oil and gas field automation indicates a much different trajectory, one that is probably more typical for the bulk of the workforce. When you have absolutely no automation on a well, you need someone sitting there 24/7 to monitor it. Given shifts and days off, you probably need 4-5 people total whose full time job it is to maintain this well. When you add the bare minimum of safety features to a well, such as shutting in when the tank fills in, or closing if the temperatures get too far out of range, or shutting when the flow drops below a minimum, then you can theoretically fire 2-3 of those people, but in reality this does not happen. Instead, they drill 2 more wells, put the same safety features on them, then have the workers rotate between the wells, doing the tasks of maintaining production on them. The more and more automation that gets added, the more wells get drilled and the more of the field that a pumper maintains. Each time moving up to focusing on just the top level tasks, replacing worn parts, tweaking the timings, etc. What you mainly get is that the automation is allowing them to expand more quickly than normal, and is slightly reducing the number of new people hired.

Because these people are doing things that are worth more money, their salary goes up as well. The wages and the capital costs rise in tandem as the field grows. 

Where you do end up firing 2-3 people is when suddenly the prices plummet and you're no longer making as much money as before. The workers are cut, the remaining workers have to work longer hours maintaining the wells that the cut workers used to maintain. But they're not really spending anything on new automation or any other capital expenditures either because they don't have the money. They reduce new well production to just enough to keep their rate steady, if any at all. If the remaining people are overworked, they might bring in a cheaper, younger person to handle some of the work. They may shutter some very poorly performing wells and reclaim them instead. If the prices start rising again, they'll evaluate how overworked people are, how many opportunities there are for expansion, and hire more people based on that and if they can afford it.

So, I think that the rate of decrease in jobs isn't going to be exactly the same as the rate that automation is added, but rather a cyclical effect. Automation added during the good times, but no job losses until the cyclical bad times. This would probably slow down the 25-50% losses described by a few more decades.

Basically more people mean bigger demand. Bigger demand means we need a better way to make goods. Also due to advertising people need what they don't need. That basically answer's your question. Why everything is getting bigger. Now you communicate in a smaller world where you don't know where people are from. Now this can be supplied by small businesses helped out by stocks, so a rich man doesn't need to invest into your company to make it work. Except a big business has more resources.

There's this book I read recently, "The Artificial Intelligence Conspiracy", by one Arthur Shakarian. The subtitle is "How the World's Elites Plan to Replace Everybody Else with Intelligent Machines". (found here: https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Conspiracy-EverybodyElse-Intelligent-ebook/dp/B01AHZU5ES/ )

I used to think it was bull, what with some of the richest people in the world actively getting together and planning the last push for automation, so they could get rid of the masses (i.e., us) for good this time. But with everything I've seen over the past few months, this article included, it seems like the author might not be that far off the mark.

The most frightening thing in the book, to my mind, was the idea that the elites won't even have to suppress us with force or kill us all once they no longer need us (because their cars drive themselves, their kitchens cook on their own, and their laundry gets folded by little laundry robots). On the contrary, we'll go peacefully, even blissfully, thanks to (wait for it) interactive Virtual Reality porn.

There's a whole chapter about this, and it's positively horrifying. (would quote, but the book's on my other machine.) IIRC the argument goes something like: Look at porn today, how bad it is and 2D and non-interactive, and people get addicted to it anyway. Now look at the very early stages of VR we're in, still choppy and expensive and all, but we're already seeing bad cases of VR addiction, disorientation and dissatisfaction with the real world. Now put the two together and wait a few years (or months, at the pace of today's progress), and you get mature interactive VR porn that will be the drug to end all drugs.

Even if we don't end up like these autodarwinators who forget to eat and drink because they're so hooked on computer games, actual real-world sex will be so clearly inferior to VR sex with AIs that learn exactly how to please and tease and edge us, that we'll die out within a few generations max. And this goes for women as well as men. Who wants to procreate if you can have perfect sex tuned to your exact preferences, no matter how unrealistic or specific, forever?

I can actually see that happening. And the most frightful thing? I'm not even entirely sure I would mind.

To say that this was a great article would take understatement to a new level.

I've written on this subject as well, here and elsewhere, as in my article on a solution to poverty, as well as my On Morals piece.  I'm effectively blacklisted by many libertarians for the solution piece. 

Thanks

I don't believe he was motivated by greed, but by a disatisfaction on how games were going. Realizing he could make games he like if he could fund it started a software company to fund his game making.

I didn't mean to imply that I was divining 'truths' in the GC series, just that playing this sort of game can be a sort of 'exercise' that can feed into deliberate thinking about political economy.

A couple of times over the years I've poked at the devs about taking away a major 'bias' of the series by doing something analogous to the US going off the gold standard. I really want to see the BC economy 'demoted' to just one way of accruing, transferring, and using excess resources. I still find it very, very odd that a civilization like the Yor have any use for a currency. Of course I understand that my 'little' fantasy there is the opposite of little when it comes to the code planning and building.

One day, maybe around GC 6 or 9, I'd really love to play a game where an alliance led by market-fueled Iridium and Terra might go up against one led by post-currency Altarians and Iconians, with the merry-mad Snathi Revenge poaching both currency and the econ-strategic resources (maybe energy, basic macro-molecules, and industrial metals).

<<What about lawyers? They’re screwed. As someone who routinely gets sued (intellectual property is a mine field), I have a lot of experience with lawyers. The most expensive part, by far, is discovery. This is the part where each party sifts through the other’s sides stuff to determine what bullshit to put into their motions to convince a jury that their narrative of the case is the correct one. 99% of that time is wasted. Machines could handle that 99%.

It is unlikely that there will be such a thing as a paralegal in 20 years. They’ll go the way of the gas station attendant.>>

Unlikely.  For one thing, lawyers make the law and it would be easy to prohibit the practice of law by a non-human.  LOL.  Second, lawyers need to speak and most robots can't speak. No a trained parrot like Siri does not qualify.   Third, computers are widely used by attorneys as a tool in the discovery process, there are no machines or software that can do what lawyers do.

More broadly, robots are good at very limited tasks and there are no signs that autonomous cars are likely to hit the streets in any great numbers any time soon.  We can thank lawyers for that because every time there is an accident, there will be a lawsuit alleging defective software caused the accident. 

I'm still waiting for flying cars from the 1950's shows or even flying hoverboards (yeah I know but the ones that are supposed to be coming out are not the right ones).

It's actually still quite rare. The rare issues are made much bigger because of the media. That's not to say there aren't problems, but they're not as wide spread as the media would like you to believe. Most of the issues descend primarily from the ridiculous drug war and the way that, just like Prohibition before it, it's encouraged criminal gangs and mafias. That leads to all kinds of police racial profiling of those who resemble the gang members and training problems surrounding their reactions to said people, and some false-positives that get wall to wall news coverage. When false positives mean dead innocent citizens though, they should probably do something to err on the other side, but for them, they believe that false negatives mean dead police officers. 

Unfortunately, records being kept on this aren't as expansive or easily collected as one might want, so it's difficult to pin down exact numbers of how many of these are false positives and excessive use of force, but we're hearing about maybe 10-20 per year out of the 1000 or so people shot by police, but that false positive number could easily be higher. Police officers shot has been hovering around the 50's per year, way down from the highs of the 70's or the high's of the alcohol prohibition era. (also half that of a couple decades ago.) A bit higher this year because of a few nutballs. There's been a number of documented cases where the incentives are all backwards for this sort of thing. Police officers being fired for "failing to eliminate a threat" and such.

If you were a conspiracy nut, you might conclude that drug prohibition was specifically designed so they could do this, but I don't believe that line of reasoning.

I'm still an advocate for ending the prohibition, and working towards robust systems for mitigating drug use instead of criminalizing it.

Hi Brad!

Thanks for a very interesting read. Since you asked for a comment from a medical perspective, let me give you my 5 cents on automation. I've been a medical doctor in Sweden for 5 years now, and recently started my residency in radiology. Before choosing my current field, I was quite worried I might end up becoming a specialist in a completely automated field of medicine within 5 years. I'm sure if you set IBM's Watson on looking at x-rays, you could get a reasonably high accuracy already now. However the problems with automation in healthcare are manifold.

The biggest problem seems to be that it is done so incredibly inefficiently. You would think using modern software would reduce the need to fill out forms over and over again. Instead it turns out, making things quicker to document, gives you more time to document even more stuff! And because it is implemented in such a bad fashion, we're now filling out forms for several different authorities, that don't communicate with each other. The same data is entered over and over again. Swedish doctors and nurses spend most of their time filling forms and documenting stuff no one cares about any longer. Unless of course you're being reported for some mistake (perceived or real), the mass of text we document is not helping the patients, the medical staff or any researchers.

And yet, Sweden is one of the most advanced IT countries in Europe. This is what gives me most comfort when thinking of automation. Healthcare IT is extremely backwards; I'd say we're using software from the late 90's. Even the server solutions are abysmal, it takes us so long to get journal/medical record texts, and lab reports - simple text and numbers data. And not only is it slow, its insecure as well - I've lost count on how many times the servers are down (sometimes for days!), and healthcare suddenly stops, because we have no way to order new tests or x-rays. Hell, we don't even know whom the patient is without our IT!

Imagine then, an IT revolution in Swedish healthcare, would that make automation possible? I'd argue it would start, but that it'd take at least another 10 years until it starts to become reality. The reason? Human workers are extremely all-round capable resources. Our sensors are so exquisite that we don't even think about how we recognize the data from our finger-tips, our nostrils, vision and hearing, all simultaneously. Place a finger on wrist, you feel the patients pulse, heat, wetness among other things. Sure, there are apparatus that can do the same thing, but they cost money, and they break, and they require a technician for service, a technician to use it, and someone to sterilize it. We're a long way from a cheap and reliable all encompassing solution for these problems. Imagine Honda's ASIMO trying to do any of these tasks - 10+ years seems a reasonable time for technology to mature.

And what if we did have some sort of capable robot, that could help lift patients onto toilets, give patients their pills and take blood tests, would that mean the end of nurses? Again probably not in the near future, because the healthcare "industry" has an infinite demand and finite resources. You're not replacing workers, you're freeing them to do other tasks for other people. 

So what about my field, radiology? Surely a learning AI could learn to interpret x-ray images, at least the easy ones? Yes, at least simple images of normal human beings, but things get tricky when you deal with sick people. Often, they are not normal, sometimes far from it. They are elderly, whom have received random injuries and surgery (which sometimes is random as well) that make them different from normal. Patients with disabilities might not be cooperative during examination, a person with dementia might try to run out of the lab while taking x-ray pictures. Or patients with syndromes, mutations which have a large varied effect on human anatomy.

And when AI does get good enough to examine x-rays and other things, I'm 100% sure legislation will be too slow handle growing privacy issues that arise with handling more and more data. There won't be any actual issues of course, I mean we've all taken an oath, but that doesn't mean that legislators will allow us to implement things quickly, even if it is for the good of our patients.

The problems outlined above are of course possible (and some cases easy) to handle, and believe me, I'd rather the IT problems were solved than going to work and not knowing whom I'm treating or examining. But I think Swedish healthcare simply can't afford to jump headlong into automation, simply because it can't even handle IT and other technology from the last 20 years. I'm (probably) safe in radiology for the future of my career anyway.

Let me know if you think I'm wrong, I might have to rethink my career in that case!

Sincerely,

Hans Lee

I've long been worried about this issue and I while I share the concerns expressed here and in the comments, I have a bit of a different angle to add, one that I've never see discussed, even amongst economists.

Our economy is the result of the interaction between two primary markets, the first for goods and services, the second, equally important, the market for labor. A good or service offered for sale has to warrant enough demand to pay for the labor associated with its production. This is counterbalanced by the need for people to sell their labor in order to pay for goods and services they need or want. These dual constraints act as important checks. In determining resource allocations, people vote with their labor as much as they vote with the money they gain from that labor. By selecting for high paying jobs, they're selecting for more productive, more "in demand" goods and services. What this article points out is that we're essentially eliminating or at least drastically reducing, the impact of the labor market. As best I can tell, for the first time in human history we'll only have the goods/services market for people to express their preferences. That will change economics at a fundamental level, its revolutionary, not evolutionary.

Human nature will work against us in this. For the owners, the people who own the natural resources, the productive capacity and the robots, there will be a strong temptation to simply use that capacity for their own desires. Once you own the entire means of production, why bother making widgets to sell so that you can turn around and use that money to buy a high end performance car? Simply have your robots make you one. I know I'm being a bit simplistic in the ease that robotic labor can be reassigned, but the principle still holds. I'd argue that history has shown that the upper class don't really need money if they have the equivalent of slave labor.

For the masses, some kind of redistribution will almost certainly be done by the gov't. Whether that be dollars or in goods and services doesn't really matter. What matters is their human nature will lead them to demand ever more simply because it costs them little to do so -- and there will be little else politicians can offer them than a bigger redistribution. It will be a situation where a little effort in the political arena can net bigger rewards than effort applied anywhere else. Of course people will do it.

We'll have these two elements diametrically opposed and I can't see how one side doesn't wind up dominating the other (it might even flip-flop a few times). Both sides want to influence resources allocation in their favor, they just have different means available to them and without the labor market to hold both sides in check -- well, it just doesn't look good from my point of view.

I think that whatever solution is out there that might produce a better outcome *has* to include keeping the masses involved in some kind of "labor" market. By that I mean that normal every day people get to make routine choices on what work is done by the robots *and* they earn rewards based on their choices, for good or ill. Some might suggest the capital markets for that, but I don't think its a good fit, the primary reason being time window. The labor market has a short time window with regular, largely predictable, paydays, not so with capital. Labor earns its paycheck whether a venture fails or succeeds, again, not so with capital. In my opinion, those differences plus others make the capital markets a poor stand-in for the labor market. Exactly what this new labor market looks like and how we get there are big tough questions, but I think its has to be part of what we address if we're to have any hope of a bright future for humanity.