/polidicks/ - Politics

"…It’s that problem, and others like it, that many observers think robots are beginning to solve. This isn’t just a First World issue. The Taiwanese company Foxconn is the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer electronics. If you’re reading this on an electronic gadget, there is a good chance that it was made in one of Foxconn’s factories, since the firm makes iPhones, iPads, iPods, Kindles, Dell parts, and phones for Nokia and Motorola and Microsoft. It employs about 1.2 million people around the world, many of them in China. At least that’s how many it currently employs, but the company’s founder, Terry Gou, has spoken of an ambition to buy and deploy a million robots in the company’s factories. This is nowhere near happening at the moment, but the very fact that the plan has been outlined makes the point: it isn’t only jobs in the rich part of the world that are at risk from robots. The kind of work done in most factories, and anywhere else that requires repetitive manual labour, is going, going, and about to be gone.

And it’s not just manual labour. Consider this report from the Associated Press: […] it wasn’t written by a human being. This has been a joke or riff for so long – such and such ‘reads like it was written by a computer’ – that it’s difficult to get one’s head around the fact that computer-generated news has become a reality. A company called Automated Insights owns the software which wrote that AP story. Automated Insights specialises in generating automatic reports on company earnings: it takes the raw data and turns them into a news piece. The prose is not Updikean, but it’s better than E.L. James, and it gets the job done, since that job is very narrowly defined: to tell readers what Apple’s results are. The thing is, though, that quite a few traditionally white-collar jobs are in essence just as mechanical and formulaic as writing a news story about a company earnings report. We are used to the thought that the kind of work done by assembly-line workers in a factory will be automated. We’re less used to the thought that the kinds of work done by clerks, or lawyers, or financial analysts, or journalists, or librarians, can be automated. The fact is that it can be, and will be, and in many cases already is.

In the next two decades, 47 per cent of employment is ‘in the high-risk category’, meaning it is ‘potentially automatable’. Interestingly, though not especially cheeringly, it is mainly less well-paid workers who are most at risk. Recent decades have seen a polarisation in the job market, with increased employment at the top and bottom of the pay distribution, and a squeeze on middle incomes. ‘Rather than reducing the demand for middle-income occupations, which has been the pattern over the past decades, our model predicts that computerisation will mainly substitute for low-skill and low-wage jobs in the near future. By contrast, high-skill and high-wage occupations are the least susceptible to computer capital.’ So the poor will be hurt, the middle will do slightly better than it has been doing, and the rich – surprise! – will be fine…"

"…Imagine an economy in which the 0.1 per cent own the machines, the rest of the 1 per cent manage their operation, and the 99 per cent either do the remaining scraps of unautomatable work, or are unemployed. That is the world implied by developments in productivity and automation. It is Pikettyworld, in which capital is increasingly triumphant over labour. We get a glimpse of it in those quarterly numbers from Apple, about which my robot colleague wrote so evocatively. Apple’s quarter was the most profitable of any company in history: $74.6 billion in turnover, and $18 billion in profit. Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, said that these numbers are ‘hard to comprehend’. He’s right: it’s hard to process the fact that the company sold 34,000 iPhones every hour for three months. Bravo – though we should think about the trends implied in those figures. For the sake of argument, say that Apple’s achievement is annualised, so their whole year is as much of an improvement on the one before as that quarter was. That would give them $88.9 billion in profits. In 1960, the most profitable company in the world’s biggest economy was General Motors. In today’s money, GM made $7.6 billion that year. It also employed 600,000 people. Today’s most profitable company employs 92,600. So where 600,000 workers would once generate $7.6 billion in profit, now 92,600 generate $89.9 billion, an improvement in profitability per worker of 76.65 times. Remember, this is pure profit for the company’s owners, after all workers have been paid. Capital isn’t just winning against labour: there’s no contest. If it were a boxing match, the referee would stop the fight.

Consider the driverless car being developed by Google. This is both miraculous, in that to an amazing extent it already works, and severely limited, in that there are many routine aspects of driving that it can’t manage – it can’t, for instance, overtake, or ‘merge’ with flowing traffic, which is no small issue in the land of the freeway. But imagine for a moment that all the outstanding technical issues are solved, and the fully driverless car is a reality. It would be astonishing, especially when/if it were combined with clean energy sources. Your car would take your children on the school run while they scramble to finish their homework, then come home to take you to work while you do your email, then drive off and self-park somewhere, then pick you up at the end of the day and take you to dinner, then drive you home while you sleep off that last regrettable tequila slammer, and all – thanks to self-co-ordinating networks of traffic information from other driverless cars – cleanly and frictionlessly. It’s not clear that the car would even need to be ‘your’ car: it would just have to be a vehicle that you could summon whenever you needed it. This isn’t just an urbanist vision, since there is a lot of immobility and isolation in the countryside that would be immeasurably helped by the driverless car.

The catch: all the money would be going to Google. An entire economy of drivers would disappear. The UK has 231,000 licensed cabs and minicabs alone – and there are far, far more people whose work is driving, and more still for whom driving is not their whole job, but a big part of what they are paid to do. I suspect we’re talking about a total well into the millions of jobs. They would all disappear or, just as bad, be effectively demonetised. Say you’re paid for a 40-hour week, half of which is driving and the other half loading and unloading goods, filling out delivery forms etc. The driving half just became worthless. Your employer isn’t going to pay you the same amount for the other twenty hours’ labour as she was paying you for forty, since for twenty of those hours all you’re doing is sitting there while your car does the work. That’s assuming the other part of your job doesn’t get automated too. The world of driverless cars would be amazing, but it would also be a world in which the people who owned the cars, or who managed them, would be doing a lot better than the people who didn’t. It would look like the world today, only more so…"

"…Larry Page, founder and CEO of Google, is sanguine about that, as he recently said in an interview reported in the Financial Times:
>He sees another boon in the effect that technology will have on the prices of many everyday goods and services. A massive deflation is coming: ‘Even if there’s going to be a disruption in people’s jobs, in the short term that’s likely to be made up by the decreasing cost of things we need, which I think is really important and not being talked about.’
>New technologies will make businesses not 10 per cent, but ten times more efficient, he says. Provided that flows through into lower prices: ‘I think the things you want to live a comfortable life could get much, much, much cheaper.’
>Collapsing house prices could be another part of this equation. Even more than technology, he puts this down to policy changes needed to make land more readily available for construction. Rather than exceeding $1m, there’s no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, shouldn’t cost $50,000, he says.
>For many, the thought of upheavals like this in their personal economics might seem pie in the sky – not to mention highly disturbing. The prospect of millions of jobs being rendered obsolete, private-home values collapsing and the prices of everyday goods going into a deflationary spiral hardly sounds like a recipe for nirvana. But in a capitalist system, he suggests, the elimination of inefficiency through technology has to be pursued to its logical conclusion.

It says a lot about the current moment that as we stand facing a future which might resemble either a hyper-capitalist dystopia or a socialist paradise, the second option doesn’t get a mention."

Tl;dr
At least half of our jobs, everywhere, are going to get taken over by robots SOON. In the long term, there will be no jobs left.

Last thread (on /pol/), pretty much everyone agreed that this technological advancement is going to cause massive social upheaval. So this thread, I want to see if we can focus on solutions to the problem.

What can we do to enable the smoothest possible transition into the robot age? How can we avoid genocide and mass starvation? What are you going to do to help?