This is a conversation that I think we all need to have. In the future... creeps up faster and faster. Our mind's eye vision of how fast technology evolves is fixed. Looking back only a few generations, people will conflate that this can describe our inherit humanity for the foreseeable future. I don't think it does.
As an example, I often read opinion pieces by local well-to-do progressives; a topic that comes up often is our transportation infrastructure and how we should start buying, living, working local. For a variety of reasons, all of which I agree with for the most part. I can't help but ask myself – will it matter when every car drives itself and is propelled by emission-less energy? Far off, right? Maybe. Or maybe it's 10-15 years away.
Local food is one thing—it seems absurd to ship a cucumber thousands of miles when I can just grow some in my garden. But a global society is absolutely essential to the continued well-being of our species. Globalisation is a powerful force against misinformation and propaganda—and in turn xenophobia and war.
And our global transportation infrastructure isn’t perfect, but it is the best it’s ever been in all of human history. So I would argue that buying locally is far less important than, say, buying handcrafted goods from small businesses, regardless of location.
It seems to me that the availability of local food in sufficient quantities to feed tens of millions is a luxury of places which have the conditions necessary to produce such bounty. What does eat local mean for Canadians or people in Arizona? Greenhouses? It's a nice thing to have but a bit impractical for most, unless we would prescribe them a limited diet.
It doesn't matter if cars are powered by pixie dust and traffic controlled by oracles; using a 2500 pound, six-by-12 foot box to transport 1-2 humans plus cargo is inefficient and wasteful of both energy and space.
I don't disagree. Trouble is, no one cares. And if you have have your cake (SUV) and eat it, too (cheap fuel) I don't know how or where these changes will occur.
The problem is, changing to a different fuel source is a decades-long engineering problem, while building public transit just requires the doing and reducing sprawl is a natural consequence of lowered real estate prices and heightened fuel prices.
Or we could try switching to pixie dust and oracles, and when that doesn't solve the problem we could do what we were supposed to do from the outset.
The sexist undercurrent of the article was thick, but it didn't ripple the surface until about half way though.
The mere idea of the 'pink collar' is silly. Hair cuts are a highly elastic service, and nursing and teaching are seeing a huge downward pressure in wages are are only being protected by unions.
> Nurses may be more valued than surgeons; kindergarten teachers paid better than university professors.
Dogs and cats living together, human sacrifice, mass hysteria!
This article completely misses the point - 2000 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through pulleys and levers. 500 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through gears and belts. 100 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through steam and rail. 50 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through internal combustion. Ten years go, machines did the work of 1000 men through the transistor, and today machines do the work of 1000 men through advanced heuristic systems, statistical analysis, etc.
We will continue to automate processes so that we can all, collectively, lead better lives.
I'm not quite as sanguine on what technological change will do to employment, though I'm not sure what precisely it will do, either. I don't think the smooth progression you paint is quite accurate; there have been really major upheavals that had significant social impacts, not a slow transition with a constant ratio. The industrial revolution led to a large proportion of the population rushing to cities, and a whole host of urban problems (tenement housing, large-scale homelessness, urban crime, hygiene problems) that produced backlashes such as, at one extreme, Marxism, and at the moderate middle-ground, the modern welfare state and trade unionism.
In particular, there was a large, relatively short-term shift in employment, from "almost everyone" working in agriculture to a majority of people working in factories. It's not 100% clear to me what today's version of "factories" will be in that analogy, the mass employment sink that people can migrate to, the way they migrated agriculture->factories. I guess "the service industry" is as good a guess as any, which is roughly what this article is proposing a more specific version of (essentially, the high-touch, hard-to-automate subset of the service industry).
In that case, it's not clear to me how we'll "all, collectively, lead better lives", unless we transition to a much stronger welfare state, like in one of those sci-fi utopias where everyone's basic needs (food/shelter/healthcare) are taken care of by robots, and you only need to work if you want luxuries or feel a particular inner drive to do so.
If, on the other hand, we have a proportion of people doing quite well, and a large number of people unemployed in slums, that seems not too good as a collective outcome.
Lets also consider that there is no such thing as "uneducated" Everyone has different forms of education they may just not materialize into having capital letters after their name.
What we need to be thinking about is how to mend the system to better prepare and incentive people to work on whatever problems society deems to be worthy. That may be through formal education programs or it may be through something completely different.
On Mayday of all days such a characterization of Marxism as the extreme on a 1D number line of political responses to urbanization feels simplistic.
Of the infinitude of academic distinctions of Marx's writing to be raised here, the distinction between "political Marxism" and "analytical Marxism" seems fruitful. For the purposes of this distinction, political Marxism would be the set of writings embedded in the political climate of Marx's age, The Manifesto, etc. The politics that resulted from these writings bloomed initially, but as the mantle was passed through Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky the politics became increasingly fraught with problems (being gentle here.)
Analytical Marxism for me is limited to _Capital_. Marx proceeds analytically, taking the rich tradition of political economy to heart. Ricardo and Adam Smith are addressed directly. Marx attempts no emotional arguments here, no appeals for solidarity or revolution. Instead, the ideals of capitalism (e.g. exchanges between individuals are mutually beneficial) are taken as true, and Marx attempts to create a framework for analyzing the structural forces that result from this economic mode.
_Capital_ provides a set of analytical tools that are timeless and non-dogmatic. A great example is the exploration of how the relative prices of various commodities are set (Marx suggests it is emergent behavior). _Capital_ also takes on such problems such as the contradiction between exchange value and use value, and how the investor's and producer's perspective on exchanging commodities and money differs. These are problems many writers wave away as non-problems by maintaining a myopic focus on individual exchanges.
Another text you might be particularly interested in is _The Making of the English Working Class_ by E.P. Thompson, which expounds a humanist perspective on the migration from farm to factory in England.
Oh that part I don't really disagree with. I was meaning to point to revolutionary uprisings as a fairly extreme reaction, which I associated with Marxism, but I suppose I meant the revolutionary left in general. Perhaps I should've used a less loaded word than "extreme"; I was just looking for a way to characterize the strength of the backlash that was stronger than the milder backlash that produced the reformist social-democratic parties. I do think that the urban discontent and associated political ferment from the mid-19th through early 20th centuries was at least largely in response to industrialization (if I recall, even Marx says something like that, which is why he didn't think a communist revolution in a pre-industrial country like Russia was likely or sensible).
In a certain methodological sense a lot of people are Marxist, I suppose, even who don't use the term, so I agree he's been very influential. For example, Jared Diamond is sometimes called a neo-Marxist in the non-political sense, because that materialist way of looking at history (as the product of broad structural forces) is traced back to Marx.
2000 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 mules through pulleys and levers. 500 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 mules through gears and belts. 100 years ago, machines did the work of 50 mules through steam and rail. 50 years ago, machines did the work of no mules through internal combustion.
Some people's marginal product just isn't enough to make employing them more useful than turning them into glue. In a metaphorical sense.
This article seems heavy on vague predictions and light on data? And also phrasing everything as a question? Which alleviates them of the responsibility actual assertions?
That aside, it ignores the obvious other domain which is largely immune to mechanized replacement – designing the machines themselves (or software/algorithms/etc). A domain which, as we all lament here weekly, is still a heavily male dominated one.
Exactly. As blue-collar jobs are mechanized (or outsourced), the workforce gradually shifts towards knowledge work, which is inherently higher-paying.
Also, perhaps I am not forward-thinking enough, but I hope we never see the day where we have AI Kindergarten teachers. This is a pretty depressing future the author envisions, where cutting hair is among the most valued jobs but we leave the task of hacking at our insides to robots.
Immune for now anyway. If we reach a point at which machines can reach or exceed human intelligence, we will find ourselves replaced there too. So far it seems that point is well ahead in the future though, as AI is a challenging field.
The idea that men can't be empathetic and perform empathy based jobs such as nursing and teaching kindergarten is as silly as the idea that women don't have the logical aptitude for computer programming.
I can pretty much guarantee you that men have as much to bring to nursing and teaching as women do to the tech sector.
I don't think the OP--or anyone--is saying that men can't do these jobs. Very nearly the opposite. The article says that these jobs are currently "largely performed by women" and suggests that the barriers to men performing these jobs are contingent cultural factors, which may reverse.
That's slowly starting to happen in some areas, notably nursing. There are even starting to be a mirror-image of organizations like Society of Women Engineers (which advocate for women, who are under-represented in engineering) in growing areas where men are under-represented, such as the American Assembly for Men in Nursing (http://aamn.org/).
As far as I can tell, most consumers will happily jettison the 'personal touch' in pursuit of lower prices. (See: Walmart)
The coldly efficient robot nurse who can handle all the mechanical tasks but doesn't have human compassion will be cheaper and thus wildly preferred by anyone paying for health care. And that goes double when government/corporate/payment indirection leads to a lack of real choice by the direct consumer of health care.
Similarly as soon as robots can match an $8 haircut (and those are nothing special), they'll destroy the low-end of grooming.
Teaching has a fair shot; it's not generally acceptable to pursue reduced education costs in a vacuum. But I wouldn't underestimate the for-profit schooling industry's ability to selectively report and lobby their way into pitching robot teachers as the key to more effective education.
We've already got robot teachers in many states as they move to online education. Which so far has cost a huge amount of money, made massive profits for private companies and failed to produce decent test results.
>This raises some big questions, of course, and not the least of which is how this will affect the social and economic status of these professions. Nurses may be more valued than surgeons; kindergarten teachers paid better than university professors.
If we maintain a capitalist economy and a large number of jobs do become mechanized (and not replaced with new jobs) it stands to reason that competition for the remaining jobs will increase. Competition results in driving the market price for jobs down, not up. While human nurses WOULD be paid better than robot surgeons, I don't think wages would increase--they'd decrease.
The assumption that given "jobs where empathy and 'emotional intelligence' can be considered requirements" have been "immune to the creeping mechanization of the workplace" in the past we can expect them to exhibit such immunity in the future deserves more scrutiny.
A recent article on HN, "Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet?" [1], showed that at least children will "attribute moral accountability and emotions" to relatively simple robots. I'm not sure I can say I'd definitely prefer a human kindergarten teacher in a hypothetical future where the alternative is a robot that objectively integrates the consensus scientific opinion on the ideal behaviour of a young child's developmental mentor tailored to the attributes of my child.
Off: I'm slowly starting to hate the whole "Google Self Driving Cars" thing.
Usually it is a product first, a hype later. Hype without product is a vaporware. Google is a vaporware maker officially by forcing the "Google Self Driving Cars" meme on us.
It's not much more real than praising Russian Giant Humanoid Combat Robots, for the in-joke.
I would bet some money to predict that there would not be any feasible automatic cars from Google, and ones that would actually enter your life are rather to be a product of some startup.
I think with something like this, if it isn't Google then it will be one of the large car manufacturers first.
I just don't see a random company popping out of nowhere and bringing something like this to the market as the costs involved in the production are going to be huge.
Many creative processes are unlikely to get outsourced to machines: writing songs, drawing pictures, and composing poetry. Not that people haven't experimented with software that writes poetry or draws pictures, these projects tend to involve so much human oversight that they hardly represent a departure from business as usual.
Hopefully we will live in a world in which robots do all of the dangerous and boring tasks leaving us to compose ballads and knit sweaters.
My dad's been a nurse for just about three decades now. The twist is that he's been an APRN for most (or all) of that time, in specific a CRNA. He has also practiced in places where he's run the anesthesia department along with a small group (two-three others usually) of other CRNAs. Also men, in my experience.
Now, my first response to this is that his whole job requires preventing people from feeling pain, dealing with people who are in pain, and generally making pain go away. If that isn't empathy you've mis-defined the term.
My second response is to wonder whether APRNs in general are mostly male. If they are, that kind of blows this 'pink collar' stuff out of the water on a more factual basis.
Even if they aren't, though, it's still a dumb idea: Men do that kind of work. Men don't need to worry about being replaced by women in the medical field unless some idiot mandates that their jobs go to women simply because they're women.
(APRN: Advanced Practice Registered Nurse. A nurse who has training above and beyond what the average RN possesses, and has often specialized in a given sub-field.
CRNA: Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist. A CRNA handles anesthesia, which is all about minimizing pain. A CRNA may or may not operate under the supervision of an Anesthesiologist, who is an MD who specializes in anesthesia. Typically, CRNAs in rural areas work alone and are therefore among the few nurses allowed by law to prescribe drugs (the drugs that control pain are strictly controlled by law, as you may well imagine).)
As an example, I often read opinion pieces by local well-to-do progressives; a topic that comes up often is our transportation infrastructure and how we should start buying, living, working local. For a variety of reasons, all of which I agree with for the most part. I can't help but ask myself – will it matter when every car drives itself and is propelled by emission-less energy? Far off, right? Maybe. Or maybe it's 10-15 years away.
reply