I'm sympathetic to the 'not this time' argument but I don't think it has to do with the scale of technical disruption. At the beginning of the 20th century nearly half the labor force was in agriculture; now it's somewhere between 1-2%.
In terms of magnitude of displacement, I don't think what we are seeing now, or anticipate seeing in the next decade is of a different kind than what we saw with the mechanization of agriculture. What concerns me is:
1) The rate at which these disruptions are occurring, and
2) The ability for displaced labor to find other opportunities in the economy.
The shift from agriculture to manufacturing took place over decades and didn't require significant retraining. The shifts we are seeing now cut across a wide swath of 'unskilled' labor which is appears to be in a general decline. (I recommend checking out EconTalk episodes with David Autor and Erik Hurst: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?mt=...)
Peter Drucker forecasted this 30 years ago. Agriculture went from 50% -> 2% of the workforce. Same is happening with Manufacturing. The main issue is training.
Those graphs aren't in any conflict; of course if the proportion of workers in one industry goes down, the proportion of workers employed in some other industry must go up, mathematically (the BLS graph being percentage of the total workforce, rather than percentage of the total population).
I see your objection that to consider agriculture's decline indicative of the future of labor in general could be considered cherry-picking, but I think the video at least attempts to respond to this charge, explaining why its author does not feel other industries will "pick up the slack" in the same way in the future as happened in the past for jobs lost to automation.
[For what it's worth, while enamored of the dream of leisure-society utopia, I am quite skeptical of the author's assessment of the current state of progress on various forms of automation (and thus, a fortiori, of the projected speed at which such automation will take off as ubiquitous in the near future). But I did want to defend them against the charge of not even considering the idea that jobs will simply shift to other industries.]
In 1890, 43% of the US population were farmers. Because of technology (fossil fuels, internal combustion engines), most of those jobs are gone for good. We're going through a massive change and some people's livelihoods will go away permanently. They're not entitled to make a living at an obsolete job, but I think we owe it to them to provide a comprehensive safety net so they can survive and retrain.
We've had massive realignments of the labor force before. At one point agriculture was the industry that all of society was built around. Nowadays, it is a small part of tge economy, with most people having little more than a surface understanding of how it works.
These realignments are generally not pretty, but hardly civilization ending.
At worst, this realignment will see humans go the way of horses after the automobile instead of farmers after the industrial revolution. That is to say, at some point, there may be not be new jobs for humans to pivot into. However even that is not an existential threat to civilization. It is a threat to democratic capitalism; but civilization existed before democratic capitalism, and will continue to exist after it.
Having said that, the claim that this latest technological innovation will finally push humans out of the labor force has been made before; and I don't see any reason yet to think that this time will be different.
You only have to go back a little over 100 years to a time when agriculture accounted for over 50% of human labor. Now it's under 2%. Yet unemployment is still under 5%.
While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the 1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time. Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since the dawn of the industrial age.
75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of agricultural employment.
In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more engaging and fulfilling as well.
There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of the world moves on. People like to work.
Just because it was true in the 19th and 20th century that human resources can reallocate from agriculture to manufacturing does not mean it will continue to be true in a future context.
Every day our R&D is chipping away at the necessity for a human labor force until we get to the day we have 0 percent employment.
>"It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?"
Two hundred years ago, most people worked in agriculture.
Then came technologies such as the McCormick Reaper, Whitney's Gin and Newcomen's engine - away went the vast majority of that work.
Yes much of it was replaced with something else and much of what replaced it was more pleasant, but the conclusion that the jobs which replaced agriculture are permanent is not forgone.
[edit] The technology upon which jobs depend in the modern era is finance, and that has been largely diverted to purposes other than creating jobs in the US over the past several decades.
> figuring out how to handle surplus labor without (often violent) societal upheaval will be the defining issue of this century
The jobs and the welfare of individuals are the top priorities IMHO, but I'm not sure there is a great problem. This isn't at all a new situation.
If you look at the jobs of a century ago in advanced economies, most of them are gone yet employment now is relatively high. Just think of the homemakers who were displaced by the automation of home care (clothes washers and dryers, vacuum cleaners, etc.); that might approach half the population. There's also textiles, mining, factory work, etc. It's a regular process: Productivity improves, less labor is needed in one area, and so it shifts to something more productive. If it wasn't for that creative destruction, there would be no software developers; they'd all be in the mines and fields.
What is different this time? I've heard all sorts of speculation, but I haven't heard anyone with expertise seriously analyze and address it.
There are problems: To me the essential issue is that while the economy in aggregate grows through this process, individuals don't live in aggregate; they suffer (and sometimes gain) tremendously. The economy may grow 4% in aggregate, but most people don't get 4% richer; some lose 100% of a job (and house and children's education, and even healthcare in the U.S.) or gain 100% of a job. Perhaps that is no longer acceptable to us; it's not to me. The factory may move to a different part of the country, and in aggregate the economy marginally grows (there are the same number of factories in the country and we can assume it was moved to increase productivity), but all those individuals lost jobs.
In addition, some research shows that a large segment of the population hasn't been getting wealthier for decades; only a few are. For example,
Yes, technology changes/improvements causes transitions in the job market but as it turns out, human needs are endless and new jobs are created for displaced workers.
My supposition isn't that it's different. Just faster. There is no "this time", it's been an ongoing process. We have been able to produce more with fewer people since the plow was invented. As the pace of technological improvement increases, the amount we can produce does as well. For a long time we just produced more and different stuff, but that's not going to last forever. I do not think this is bad necessarily, just something we now have to acknowledge and plan for. We need to start seriously considering how we structure a society where not everyone can -- or needs to -- work.
Now, 2-3%. One in 4 people had their profession superseded. A lot of that slack was taken up by industry (and war and death), but that took 20-30 years to catch up.
Is there a pool of work for people to absorb 25% of the present labor force? Most of the emerging technologies I see are labor-saving, not labor consuming.
Two possibilities for big labor demand in the next few decades:
- healthcare and assistance for the elderly
- removing development restrictions in booming cities, unleashing an epic (or Chinese-level) building boom
Both have fundamental political foundations and won't be solved solely by technology.
> Technology has done a lot more do destroy blue-collar jobs over the last century
It'd be interesting to know if this is true. My gut says it might be the opposite. Maybe many "unskilled" jobs are moved out of the U.S. for example, but that's attributable to geopolitics not technology.
But why wouldn't those jobs be replaced by robots, given that we see pretty much every job being replaced by robots?
If the time it takes to mechanize a new job is shorter than a generation, the economy crumbles from the churn and permanently displaced workers. (I'd argue we're on the cusp of this.)
Everyone is addressing that we've seen displaced labor before, but not a lot about the fact that the rate at which we're displacing labor is rapidly accelerating. (Or that massively displaced labor often only gets better after a generation of massive hardships.)
I don't think most people want to go back to mid-20th-century labor in particular. It's more a question of what people are going to be gainfully employed doing, if it's not the old things.
For example, one possible result of increased technology in manufacturing could've (in some hypothetical world) been steady employment but greatly increasing productivity, so e.g. the U.S. 2010 manufacturing sector employed the same share of the population as the U.S. 1960 manufacturing sector, but thanks to technology was vastly more productive, churning out lots more stuff per employee, with employees doing more interesting things than 1960s assembly-line drudgework.
That's one of the techno-utopian visions sometimes kicked around: for every job lost on an assembly line, a new job is created as robot technician. But instead the ratio has been more like, for every 3-4 jobs on an assembly line, a new job is created as a robot technician. At least, that's the case within the manufacturing sector; it's possible that the missing equivalent number of jobs are really being created elsewhere, in a more loosely related way, but it's hard to quantify.
I don't think anyone claimed that the new jobs would be replaced one to one with jobs maintaining the new technology, just that some of the new jobs would be in maintaining the new technology and some would be in new industries that we haven't even thought of. For a big historical example of this, look at the decrease in labor usage for farming over the last couple centuries. Where did all the people who used to work in agriculture go to? Like 1% of them now remain on the farms, maintaining the technology that displaced the other 99%, who are now dispersed across whatever other modern industry that we didn't used to have (and, we'll note, the pundits at the time highly doubted that most of the 99% being displaced on farms would find be able to find alternative positions).
150 years ago, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today 2% do and we are better fed. Population growth or shrinkage cannot match productivity technology as the key factor in material quality of life.
Countries with falling populations will just need more robots. Mass immigration isn't going to help, but this is one of those problems easily solved with tech.
The problem is that technology accelerating at a pace far greater than 1811, even though that was in the midst of the industrial revolution. Now, it makes perfect economic sense that automation of jobs on the cheap follows on to improving the economy, globally. However, this progress is associated with period of painful social adaptation.
The fear is not that demand for labor will decrease, but that the speed at which the labor force is upskilled will be outpaced by the progress of technology. So your factory and warehouse workers (who are already in a perilous financial situation) are unemployed, but more than that, their skills are no longer relevant. Increased demand for labor will not readily mesh with the skills of the existing workforce.
In the past, the gap has closed. But what if jobs are shed faster than their workers can transition to new ones? A scary, and not unrealistic prospect.
Previous technology based labor disruptions have been countered largely by economic expansions. At least until recently economic expansion required labor. If a new technology put people out of work, there was another growing area to get work in.
But we have kind of hit a tipping point though. Both in technology getting more efficient at automating even difficult work. As well as economic growth at least domestically is no longer as strong as it has been in the past.
In terms of magnitude of displacement, I don't think what we are seeing now, or anticipate seeing in the next decade is of a different kind than what we saw with the mechanization of agriculture. What concerns me is:
The shift from agriculture to manufacturing took place over decades and didn't require significant retraining. The shifts we are seeing now cut across a wide swath of 'unskilled' labor which is appears to be in a general decline. (I recommend checking out EconTalk episodes with David Autor and Erik Hurst: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?mt=...)reply