Yesterday I put up a diary about the impact of computers and automation on the existing job market.
The American Job Market Is Going To Get Worse
It generated an active and I thought interesting discussion. I thought that I'd try expanding on some of the issues that were raised.
It is quite clear that computers and digital technology already have had and will continue to have a profound impact on just about every aspect of human life. International economic relations have been transformed. Entire industries and occupational fields have disappeared. While new ones emerge there is serious question as to whether they will provide employment as we now think of it for a large portion of the people who have been displaced.
The term post-industrial has been used to describe the world that we find ourselves entering. While it does give recognition to the fact they we are living in a time of revolutionary change, like other such post terminology e.g. post-modern it has the problem of trying to define the future in terms of the past. In 1810 nobody was talking about life in a post-agricultural world. The industrial revolution that has spanned the past 200 years has shifted the employment activity of most people away from the direct production of food. Prior to that period most people had always spent most of their time and energy in the struggle to produce food, clothing and shelter with their own hands.
Many people were threatened by the changes produced by industrialization. Families moved from the countryside to polluted industrial cities did not experience immediate improvement in their circumstances. The Luddites were skilled craft workers who attempted to destroy the new machines that were reducing them to drones tending assembly lines.
What makes people think that present developments are pointing to a fundamentally new age is that with the prospect of complex robotics there is the realistic prospect that the routine production of most consumer goods can take place with very little human labor. Estimates are that that represents about 50% of the current jobs in the US and a larger portion in less industrial nations. This level of development is in sight. Without even getting further down the road to address the issue of knowledge work being taken over by artificial intelligence systems, the elimination of half of the present jobs will have a profound impact on every aspect of out social structure.
Some people raise the issue that technology has always created new jobs to replace the jobs that it destroyed. People who made buggy whips moved to making electric appliances. This was a process of the creation of new consumer products that still required human labor for their production. The change that we are looking at is human labor ceasing to be a major input in the process of production. This does not make the creation of an equal number of jobs inevitable.
I don't have a crystal ball and I don't know what is going to happen. People raise the question about how can the corporate elite make money without a mass of consumers available to but the goods produced by the robots. That makes the assumption that nothing different from our present economic relationships is possible. The nature of the world has always been that the labor of most of the population was need for survival of the species. Thus even in socialistic systems things were arranged to require work to obtain necessary economic benefit. In most societies the notion of WORK has been raised to a level of morality that implies that anybody who can work and doesn't is fundamentally degenerate. This is something that is pretty deeply ingrained and is not something that we are going to get rid of anytime soon.
One possibility is to let the robots take over and come up with a system of distributing the goods that they produce in a manner that sustains the entire population. That could take many forms. They could range from a communitarian society that aims for a fair level of economic equality to an Ayn Rand view of the future that produces a libertarian sort of feudalism where wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of the few. There are of course various possibilities in between those two poles.
What does seem likely to me is that the future isn't going to look much like the present or the past. We are not going back to the middle ages or to the new deal. It is well past time to start thinking out of the box.