He’s not wrong. The point to be made here is that we’ll have different jobs once the menial garbage we shouldn’t have been doing for the last 30 years is finally gone.
He’s not wrong. The point to be made here is that we’ll have different jobs once the menial garbage we shouldn’t have been doing for the last 30 years is finally gone.
I'm not so sure about that. The more that technology has advanced, it's allowing companies the ability to operate with very small workforces. If you look at the example of the tax experiment that's been talked about recently where the idea was to stimulate job growth by cutting taxes on businesses:
the businesses just pocketed the extra money as you'd expect because if a job doesn't need to be done, a business won't hire someone just for the sake of it. For job opportunities to exist, there has to be a need to fill and these aren't endless. Think of the likes of Walmart that employs 2.2m people worldwide with 11,000 stores, that's about 200 per store. Now imagine that everything goes online and they just ship everything to you, they don't need 200 people any more (nor people to maintain the stores). They have 245m customers per week so that's 1.45m per hour. Say that they replace 11,000 stores with 11,000 delivery hubs so each hub would deal with roughly 132 orders per hour. It doesn't take one person per hour to deal with that order but lets say one person can handle 2 orders per hour, which is getting all the shopping into bags, loading it up and shipping it out. That means they need 66 employees per hour to handle the orders vs 200. Walmart can fire over 1.4m people worldwide by going all digital and they'd be able to cover the same orders.
Where do those 1.4m people find work? They don't just get different jobs if those jobs don't exist. We've seen what happens:
"More than 23,000 people are vying for only 600 job openings at the retail giant's two new stores in Washington, D.C., according to a Walmart spokesperson. In other words, only 2.61 percent of hopefuls will land a gig."
What I'd like to see happen is that living expenses are lowered and that people work less. So instead of someone being employed for say 40 hours per week, 2 people would be employed for 20 hours per week and each of their living expenses would be lowered. When jobs become scarce again, they'd be dropped to 10 hours per week and 4 people hired.
What this means is that everyone gets an income and everyone has more free time. If they really love their job, they'll help out more than needed.
For this to happen, the biggest household expenses need to be tackled. Housing is the biggest:
Food and utilities comes next. Cutting supermarket expenses is one way to lower food costs. Creating an oversupply of affordable housing helps lower housing costs. Cars need to be much more affordable and this can happen with electric:
Lower maintenance costs, lower fuel costs and eventually lower purchase prices can help reduce that household expense. Just cut the household expenses in half and the working hours can be cut in half. Instead of 23,000 people applying to Walmart for 600 jobs, they'd apply for 1200 jobs and the same would be true at other companies.
The alternative is not that everyone just gets much nicer jobs once computers or automation take care of a lot of the lower-end jobs. Those nicer jobs would already exist if they needed done. The alternative is that more people simply end up unemployed.
The scare about automation is the same as the Luddite nonsense in the 1830s. There won’t be mass starvation or unemployment because a robot can finally pick up your garbage or make your drive-through meals. There will simply be new jobs in new industries.
The scare about automation is the same as the Luddite nonsense in the 1830s. There won’t be mass starvation or unemployment because a robot can finally pick up your garbage or make your drive-through meals. There will simply be new jobs in new industries.
A luddite would try to block progress to prevent a potential problem. We just need to prepare for the problems that progress produces well in advance. There's an employment breakdown by sector here:
Things like healthcare, education, finance and business services won't lose people so that's still a significant portion of employment opportunities. Driverless vehicles would affect transport jobs, some retail jobs would go. It could be a few million people who lose jobs. There can be government jobs to cover those if the private sector doesn't come up with something.
I still think there should be a move towards hiring more people for fewer hours and lowering household costs.
Middle managers need something to do all day long so they must print out their emails and get people to sign things. A digital equivalent of a signature would be nice. It would have to be a service that used say biometric id like touch id to generate a unique code that could only come from your input. This could be an offline service. It can be a device that takes a document id, mixes it with your personal signature device and generates a code that gets inserted. To check it was you that signed it, they just ask you to use the document id and it will generate the same code. If it doesn't, then you didn't sign it. The signature devices would have an id too so that you'd be assured of the same algorithm.
Comments
He’s not wrong. The point to be made here is that we’ll have different jobs once the menial garbage we shouldn’t have been doing for the last 30 years is finally gone.
I'm not so sure about that. The more that technology has advanced, it's allowing companies the ability to operate with very small workforces. If you look at the example of the tax experiment that's been talked about recently where the idea was to stimulate job growth by cutting taxes on businesses:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sam-brownbacks-failed-experiment-puts-state-on-path-to-penury/2014/09/21/ded58846-3eb2-11e4-9587-5dafd96295f0_story.html
the businesses just pocketed the extra money as you'd expect because if a job doesn't need to be done, a business won't hire someone just for the sake of it. For job opportunities to exist, there has to be a need to fill and these aren't endless. Think of the likes of Walmart that employs 2.2m people worldwide with 11,000 stores, that's about 200 per store. Now imagine that everything goes online and they just ship everything to you, they don't need 200 people any more (nor people to maintain the stores). They have 245m customers per week so that's 1.45m per hour. Say that they replace 11,000 stores with 11,000 delivery hubs so each hub would deal with roughly 132 orders per hour. It doesn't take one person per hour to deal with that order but lets say one person can handle 2 orders per hour, which is getting all the shopping into bags, loading it up and shipping it out. That means they need 66 employees per hour to handle the orders vs 200. Walmart can fire over 1.4m people worldwide by going all digital and they'd be able to cover the same orders.
Where do those 1.4m people find work? They don't just get different jobs if those jobs don't exist. We've seen what happens:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/20/walmart-acceptance-rate-harvard_n_4303527.html
"More than 23,000 people are vying for only 600 job openings at the retail giant's two new stores in Washington, D.C., according to a Walmart spokesperson. In other words, only 2.61 percent of hopefuls will land a gig."
What I'd like to see happen is that living expenses are lowered and that people work less. So instead of someone being employed for say 40 hours per week, 2 people would be employed for 20 hours per week and each of their living expenses would be lowered. When jobs become scarce again, they'd be dropped to 10 hours per week and 4 people hired.
What this means is that everyone gets an income and everyone has more free time. If they really love their job, they'll help out more than needed.
For this to happen, the biggest household expenses need to be tackled. Housing is the biggest:
http://www.livestrong.com/article/209626-ten-biggest-expenses-of-the-american-family/
Food and utilities comes next. Cutting supermarket expenses is one way to lower food costs. Creating an oversupply of affordable housing helps lower housing costs. Cars need to be much more affordable and this can happen with electric:
http://evobsession.com/electric-cars-2014-list/
Lower maintenance costs, lower fuel costs and eventually lower purchase prices can help reduce that household expense. Just cut the household expenses in half and the working hours can be cut in half. Instead of 23,000 people applying to Walmart for 600 jobs, they'd apply for 1200 jobs and the same would be true at other companies.
The alternative is not that everyone just gets much nicer jobs once computers or automation take care of a lot of the lower-end jobs. Those nicer jobs would already exist if they needed done. The alternative is that more people simply end up unemployed.
The scare about automation is the same as the Luddite nonsense in the 1830s. There won’t be mass starvation or unemployment because a robot can finally pick up your garbage or make your drive-through meals. There will simply be new jobs in new industries.
I am still waiting for the paperless office.
A luddite would try to block progress to prevent a potential problem. We just need to prepare for the problems that progress produces well in advance. There's an employment breakdown by sector here:
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
Things like healthcare, education, finance and business services won't lose people so that's still a significant portion of employment opportunities. Driverless vehicles would affect transport jobs, some retail jobs would go. It could be a few million people who lose jobs. There can be government jobs to cover those if the private sector doesn't come up with something.
I still think there should be a move towards hiring more people for fewer hours and lowering household costs.
Middle managers need something to do all day long so they must print out their emails and get people to sign things. A digital equivalent of a signature would be nice. It would have to be a service that used say biometric id like touch id to generate a unique code that could only come from your input. This could be an offline service. It can be a device that takes a document id, mixes it with your personal signature device and generates a code that gets inserted. To check it was you that signed it, they just ask you to use the document id and it will generate the same code. If it doesn't, then you didn't sign it. The signature devices would have an id too so that you'd be assured of the same algorithm.