Why "Automation Destroys Jobs" is a Diseased View of Humanity
I just encountered a Slashdot article headlined Hostess Saves Twinkies By Automating, Fires 94% Of Their Workforce. The general spin of the Slashdot summary is that evil corporate overlords are destroying valuable, life-giving jobs by replacing helpless workers with robots. Neither the summary nor the articles state this outright, but the summary clearly has a bias toward this perspective.
I reject this perspective wholesale, but I needed a moment to ponder exactly what is wrong with it. I think the issue here is that it views these twinkie-making factory workers as inert matter -- valuable resources which, although useless on their own, still ought to be put to good use by placing these inert workers into jobs. Like so many batteries sitting in a drawer, worthless until they're placed into some electronic device which enables them to realize their potential. But they aren't batteries. They are human beings, with hopes and dreams every bit as important as ours.
It's no wonder that society has adopted this view of humanity, since mandatory public schooling was designed to create a "nation of workers," not "a nation of thinkers." This education system effectively trains creativity out of children, attempting to render them as this inert industrial goo to be activated and controlled by Employers.
Nevertheless, in spite of the mandatory education system which attempts to mold children into this model of humanity, this model is simply wrong. It is fundamentally opposed to human nature. Human nature is not to view the world as something that happens to me, but rather to view myself as something that happens to the world.
And it's a good thing, too.
The vast majority of people who experience some of the finer things in life want others who have not experienced those things to have a chance to experience them as well. But too seldom do we ask, exactly how does that happen? How does an individual whose current role in society does not afford them these finer things transition to a role which does? And more importantly, how does this happen without becoming a zero-sum game? If one individual vacates a less desirable role for a better one, the previous role is still necessary for the new one to exist, therefore someone else must fill it instead and society as a whole is no better off.
The answer to this question is automation. Automation breaks the zero-sum property. Thanks to automation, unrewarding roles in society are eliminated entirely, thus empowering those who previously filled them to move to better positions without requiring anyone else to move back. It is the engine by which all people can eventually enjoy the best things available to humanity.
For this system to work, however, we must discard this diseased mindset, that humans are merely batteries, to be used by industry and discarded, replaced by a fresh batch off the conveyor of public education. We must remember that humans are creative beings. When one role of low value is destroyed, we can invent a new one of higher value to replace it.
There is no limit to human creativity (the root word being 'create' -- to make that which did not previously exist), thus there is no limit to the roles humans will find valuable. And by automating the roles which were once highly valuable, but have now been outmoded by higher value roles, we compromise in nothing, allowing all humans to enjoy the good afforded by those roles without having to dedicate their time and creative capacity to filling those roles.
So if you want a world where everyone has equal access to the best things life can offer, then be happy when you read a headline announcing that 94% of a factory's workers have just been freed up to contribute to society in new and more valuable ways without any loss in the good things life has to offer. By this mechanism, the best things life can offer become cheaper, and the people who had the least to offer can now offer more.
I agree with your perspective. I think what people find most scary is the prospect that as the corporation improves their efficiency the workers gain no benefit in their pay, despite in all likelihood being the ones that provided those better tools.
Automation is just the extreme form of optimization where the actual job is erased. Although new jobs will be created they will not go to the persons that lost their jobs.
Its inevitable that we start training our young people to expect to learn new skill all their lives, and I think this new technological era is beginning to do that. Young kids know learn to use complex smartphones in less than nothing.
The problem remains what to do with the unskilled population and the unfair accumulation of wealth. People work more and more hours and have less time to themselves today than 20 years ago, while our global production has skyrocketed. There is a justified feeling that not all goes well in the world. I'm a die hard fan of capitalism and free markets, but even I must admit that the working man is getting the short end of the deal and is not getting the opportunity to pursuit otherwise.
In a world of full automation, what jobs would be left, how would the common man earn a living?
The tides of change draw near.
People work more and more hours and have less time to themselves today than 20 years ago, while our global production has skyrocketed.
I agree. Since in a free market, this scenario is impossible, we can safely conclude that the reason this scenario exists is that we do not currently have a free market. Instead, we have a market based on fraudulent currencies which extract value from society and siphon it to those who control the currency. As the economy grows and production increases, they have siphoned more and more wealth off, growing fat on the spoils while we work harder and harder for less and less. This is an evil which I do not have the words to describe, and I will not continue to be part of that system forever. That's why I believe cryptocurrency is so important: it gives people a viable exit strategy from that system.
I agree with your post. This outlook is important. It is our outlook determines the future. I really like Ray Kurzweil's "Singularity." I love your tone too! I don't know how many people really know they are living in a Truman show. Your trying to light a fire really helps. I have you have good starter wood..
Over the long term, I agree (at least up to the limit where AI becomes so capable that it can replace pretty much every job humans can do).
But over the short term, you can't just have a person who was replaced by automation in their low-skilled routine job immediately move over to a higher-skilled and/or more creative job. It takes time to re-educate and re-train. And humans still have basic needs to fulfill in the meantime.
A lot of these problems are due to the failure of our current education system. But again in takes time to fix that and technological progress is moving at fast speeds and only seeming to accelerate further.
I agree that going backwards (rejecting the increase in productivity and abundance provided by automation and more generally technological progress) is not the solution. But I think hoping everything will just work out by itself in the free market with no changes in policy necessary is wishful thinking that will lead to suffering.
You're absolutely correct; they will have to learn new skills. But their old skills are now worthless, so what else should they do?
And yes, the current generations of people are incredibly damaged by the pseudo-education they received, but again, what else is there for them except to learn? Remember that while it's theorized to take 10,000 hours to become an expert in something, it takes only 20 to learn a new skill. It's hardly an insurmountable task!
Most of your argument centers around the notion that automation and the resultant job loss is positive because it "frees up" people to pursue more rewarding endeavors. The problem with this idea is that they were free in the first place. They're not like those air traffic controllers in the 80s. The national guard wouldnt have forced them them to go back to work when they wanted to leave because America needs Twinkies.
ANy one of those 22000 people could have quit being a Twinkie maker and put themselves on a path to becoming a veterinary optometrist, or a neo-impressionistic painter, or an internet pornography producer, or anything else they wanted.
Out of all the options available to them, most of these people elected to become bakers (which, by the way, isn't an ignoble or undignified trade). This is a skilled unionized trade. They probably made a good middle class wage.
Some of these people will find similar jobs with other companies, where they'll basically be starting over in terms of seniority and pay. Maybe a few will really change the course of their stars and this will be an opportunity instead of a hardship. But a lot of these people are going to be forced into menial, unskilled labor just to get by. Though its speculation, my guess is that most of these people are going to end up worse off than they were, for the foreseeable future.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against automation. I think its necessary to make society better, and in the long term and broad perspective, it confers exactly the benefits you discuss. The hardship and the displacement it causes is a necessary evil that the companies in question ought to do what they can to ameliorate.
Progress is awesome. And it will still be awesome without trying to wrap the inevitable displacement and hardship it causes in peaches and gravy.
See @ragnarok's comment. Also, you've missed my critical point: yes, the twinkie bakers could change jobs, and that's great for them individually, but it doesn't move humanity forward. People still want twinkies, so someone else has to take that job. It's zero-sum. Automation fills that role, and still meets the demand for twinkies. It's no longer zero-sum. Humanity as a whole has just taken a step forward: people get what they want (twinkies) and they get to move on from the mundane task of twinkie-making to something new.
Now yes, the individual has turbulence there (much worse than it should be due to state violence, again, see @ragnarok's comment), but that's life. The universe is constantly changing, never the same one moment to the next, so if you want to live in it, you have to adapt to the change. My point is that if humanity as a whole is ever to move forward, we have to break the zero-sum game, meaning someone's going to have to vacate a job that no one else has to fill. That's the only way to move humanity as a whole forward.
Thats the thing. No one has to take the job. It isnt as though there's a twinkie production draft. Its a matter of supply and demand.
I suppose it is zero sum in a sense, because as the supply of twinkie bakers dwindles, it costs more money to hire them, and increases the price of twinkies, so the twinkie consumers lose out.
but, As to the notion that work is a bad thing, i disagree. I don't think a world where machines do all the work for us (and people just what, sit at home and spank it?) is a better world. Maybe there are vocations that you think are positive and vocations you think are negative, but thats entirely subjective. Its only a zero sum game if you assume that a someone having a job baking twinkies is a negative either for the individual or for society as a whole.
Im probably living a life closer than most amercians get to @Ragnarok's ideal. But to get there i had to put myself through college and law school as a (you guessed it) industrial baker. No not for hostess. I made bagels, not twinkies. And no, i never contemplated it as a career. But i knew people who were professional bakers, and most of them enjoyed their profession. You seem to believe that being a baker is somehow ignoble... that society is worse off because people have to do it. But it appeals to many people. For many more, its an opportunity, not an obligation.
At first glance, your idea sounds great. But the reality is that if you get rid of the bottom, you get rid of the opportunity for anyone to start there.
As a side note, you chose a terrible example for a post lauding the wonders of automation. If you look at how hostess handled the whole thing (including spending off all their assets on massive executive bonuses to drive themselves into bankruptcy and escape their union and unemployment obligations) its really difficult to cheer for them. In terms of maximizing the "individual turbulence" due to the apoption of automation, its hostess, not the state, thats the bad guy here.
I would like to know where you got the idea what I hold work as a bad thing, so I can revise that statement. That is not a component of my argument, and I do not believe that at all.
I'd also like to disabuse you of the notion that I see baking as an ignoble profession. I have a lot of respect for bakers, and I appreciate their products very much! The subjective positive or negative connotation of a profession is also immaterial to my argument.
My argument is rooted in the observation that society is dynamic. The jobs society views as valuable are dynamic. So as society evolves, people must either evolve with it and transition to more valuable jobs as their current jobs become less valuable, or leave society because they can no longer contribute more than they consume. Moreover, any job which is worth automating is by definition not sufficiently valuable to society to justify its existence. If it were, it wouldn't be worth automating. Automation, however, allows the job to be vacated in favor of a more valuable one without being a detriment to society: the value the job created is still produced; it's just produced more cheaply now (which ultimately means it can continue to exist for the time being, rather than being lost entirely). The fact that the value can be produced more cheaply, on the macro scale, implies that costs in society are down which can only help the individuals who were unseated while they learn new skills.
For many more, its an opportunity, not an obligation.
Certainly so! And I welcome this. I don't think bakers will ever go away; human creativity is infinite and so is human desire, so there will always be infinite room for bakers to create value in new ways. But apparently, the baking of twinkies is not terribly valuable anymore.
At first glance, your idea sounds great. But the reality is that if you get rid of the bottom, you get rid of the opportunity for anyone to start there.
There is no bottom and there is no top. There will always be lower paid and higher paid jobs because there will always be lower-valued and higher-valued contributions to society. I do note, however, that the obvious jobs (the ones that meet basic needs) are all being automated away at this point, so people will need to become more creative about how they will contribute value to society. The upside is that basic needs can be met more cheaply than ever before, so it's easier than ever to experiment. Unfortunately, the Treadmill Effect mitigates this advantage. Thus it may be that if humanity is to survive (let alone flourish), it will need to quickly do away with debt-based currency.
And fortunately, twinkies are also immaterial to my point. I agree, Hostess is not to be held blameless in all of this. The idea that I attempted to express in the OP was triggered when I was reading about the Hostess situation, though, which is why I cited it rather than some other example of automation. I certainly do not cheer for a company that makes poison and sells it as food.
In your last paragraph, you make a curious claim: "94% of a factory's workers have been freed up to contribute to society... without any loss in the good things life has to offer." You don't think the loss of their income might fall into the "good" category? The immediate effect of implementing automation is a wealth transfer from former employees to the owners of the corporation. A bit gets siphoned off into the hands of whoever built the automation system, but by and large, the little guy loses and the big guy wins.
Now, in the long run, as you claim, this probably benefits society - but shouldn't we be careful that the cost of this benefit isn't the hunger of former factory workers, who've been trained not to have any transferrable skills?
Excellent title!
It is a like a mental disease to think progress and automation is a bad thing. It seems to be coming from the scared old guard that do not understand technology or the fact that it needs maintenance too.
There is a simple solution. If a robot takes your job, just make your new job focus on building and taking care of robots! They will need cleaning, fixing, replacing, and upgrading just like everything else.
True, but the point of automation is that the robot can be built and maintained by fewer people than it replaces.
The point is that there's not some arbitrary fixed limit of potential jobs. People pay for what they find valuable, and there's an infinite number of possible things people can find valuable. Furthermore, the more things get automated, the cheaper necessities become, and the more money people will have to spend on things that were previously regarded as too frivolous (there was a time when a calculator was considered too frivolous; now you get five of them for free just by visiting a career fair). People will have to provide those things, which creates new jobs as a direct consequence of old ones being automated out.
I like your writing style man! Thanks for a great post. Automation is inevitable. It's technology and that's how human kind has evolved. Also, what you wrote in response to the comment by @joelinux sums it up real well. "living means adapting."
Living means energy which is creativity, and that translates into new technologies. Without creativity we cannot live to reach our highest potential.
The solution is to disallow corporations to own all means of automation. Which they shouldn't, anyway, since ultimately everyone contributed to make those technologies in the first place.
What should be happening is a renaissance of ideas, science, invention etc, due to many hours of hobby time. Instead, the benefits of automation were stolen from us all and given to oligarchs, and we currently live in ever declining conditions because of this theft.
As the means of production become packaged as ever more accessible products - look at how far 3D printing has come along for example - I envisage a future where everybody owns the means of production due to the cost reductions brought about through automation. I also have no doubt that within 100 years people's homes will have printers which more closely resemble the replicators used in the Star Trek series'.
The question then will not be who owns the means of production but who has access to the blueprints.
Automatisation is part of the 4th industrial revolution and it is about increasing efficiency. Improving efficiency pushed humanity towards evolution and inprovement in the first place so is noting to alarm of.
Its a thing nowadays that humanity evolves from the labor market to a market of ideas and creativity.
The solution to this unemployment crisis is the basic income.