A decade ago, robots still seemed pretty limited. Now, not so much. And computers don’t just win chess any more,
they can win Jeopardy. “Watson.” “What is the of the Elegance of the Hedgehog?” They can win Go. “There are about 200 possible moves for
the average position in Go.” This is all happening really fast. And it’s causing some to forecast a future
where humans can’t find work. “There will be fewer and fewer jobs that
a robot cannot do better.” “And what are the people gonna do?” “That’s the $64,000 question.” I believe this is going to be one of the biggest
challenges we face in the coming decades. “People who are not just unemployed. They are unemployable.” But if you ask economists, they tend to have
a pretty different view from the futurists and Silicon Valley types. Do you worry that new technologies could cause
mass unemployment? Yes. No. I have devoted my career to worrying about
the labor market, particularly worrying about the living standards of low and moderate income
workers. So I worry a lot about things. I am not worried about this. One of the reasons a lot of economists are
skeptical about robots taking all the jobs is that we’ve heard that before. There was a spike of automation anxiety in
the late 20s, early 1930s when machines were starting to take over jobs on farms and
also in factories. This article from 1928 points out that there
used to be guards who opened and closed the doors on new york subway trains, and people
who took tickets before there were turnstiles. And I just love this quote: It says “building
materials are mixed like dough in a machine and literally poured into place without the
touch of a human hand.” Automation anxiety surged again in the late
1950s, early 1960s. President Kennedy ranks automation first as
job challenge. “Computers and automation threaten to create
vast unemployment and social unrest” “What should I do Mr. Whipple?” “Stop him!” This article from 1958 is about 17,000 longshoremen
who were protesting automation on the piers. And if you don't know what longshoremen are,
that’s because there aren’t many of them left. Technology destroyed a lot of those jobs. And yet, we didn’t run out of work. This chart shows the percentage of prime-age
people with jobs in the US. Ever since women joined the workforce in big
numbers, it’s stayed around 80%, outside of recessions. During this period, technology displaced some
8 million farmers in the US, 7 million factory workers, over a million railroad workers,
hundreds of thousands of telephone operators, we’ve lost gas-pumpers, elevator attendants,
travel agents. Tons of jobs have died but work persists. What you realize when you look through those
old reports is that it’s really easy for us to see the jobs being replaced by machines. It’s a bit harder to visualize the jobs
that come from what happens next. New technology creates jobs in a few ways. There are the direct jobs for people who design
and maintain the technology, and sometimes whole new industries built on the technology. But the part we tend to forget is the indirect
effect of labor-saving inventions. When companies can do more with less, they
can expand, maybe add new products or open new locations, and they can lower prices to
compete. And that means consumers can buy more of their
product, or if we don’t want any more of it, we can use the savings to buy other things. Maybe we go to more sports events or out to
dinner more often. Maybe we get more haircuts or add more day-care
for the kids. This process is how our standard of living
has improved over time and it’s always required workers. The key economic logic here is automation
does indeed displace workers who are doing work that got automated, but it doesn't actually
affect the total number of jobs in the economy because of these offsetting effects. Warnings about the “end of work” tend
to focus on this part and not all of this -- like a widely cited study from 2013,
“According to research conducted by Oxford University, nearly half of all current jobs
in America --” “47 percent of all our jobs--” “47 percent of US jobs in the
next decade or two, according to researchers at Oxford, will be replaced by robots.” That study assessed the capabilities of automation
technology. It didn’t attempt to estimate the actual
“extent or pace” of automation or the overall effect on employment. Now, all this doesn’t mean that the new
jobs will show up right away or that they’ll be located in the same place or pay the same
wage as the ones that were lost. All it means is that the overall need for
human work hasn’t gone away. Technologists and futurists don’t deny that’s
been true historically, but they question whether history is a good guide of what’s
to come. Fundamentally the argument is that this time
it’s different. That’s what I think. Imagine a form of electricity that could automate
all the routine work. I mean, that’s basically what we are talking
about here. And so It’s going to be across the board. And it is easy to underestimate technology
these days. In a 2004 book, two economists assessed
the future of automation and concluded that tasks like driving in traffic would be “enormously
difficult” to teach to a computer. That same year, a review of 50 years of research
concluded that “human level speech recognition has proved to be an elusive goal.” And now? “Ok Google. How many miles has google’s autonomous vehicle
driven?” “According to Recode, that’s because the
company announced its self-driving car project, which was created in 2009, has racked up over
two million miles of driving experience.” This is the textbook chart of advancement
in computer hardware — it’s the number of transistors that engineers have squeezed
onto a computer chip over time. Already pretty impressive, but notice that
this isn’t a typical scale: these numbers are increasing exponentially. On a typical linear scale it would look more
like this. It really is hard to imagine this not being
massively disruptive. And as the authors of The Second Machine Age
point out, processors aren’t the only dimension of computing that has seen exponential improvement. The idea of acceleration in your daily life when do you encounter that? Maybe in a car for a few seconds? In an airplane for seconds again? The idea that something can accelerate for
decades literally just continuously is just not something that we deal with. I mean, we think in straight lines. But even though there’s been all this innovation,
it’s not showing up in the data. If we were seeing this big increase in automation
we would see productivity growing much more rapidly now than it usually does, and we are
instead seeing the opposite. Labor productivity is a measure of the goods
and services we produce divided by the hours that we work. Over time it goes up - we do more with less
labor. We’re more efficient. If we were starting to see a ton of labor-saving
innovation you’d expect this line to get steeper, but when you look at productivity
growth, you can see that it has been slowing down since the early 2000s, and not just for
the US. It’s possible that new technologies are
changing our lives without fundamentally changing the economy. So will this all change? Will today’s robots and AI cause mass unemployment? There’s reason to be skeptical, but nobody
really knows. But one thing we do know is that the wealth
that technology creates, it isn’t necessarily shared with workers. When you account for inflation, the income
of most families has stayed pretty flat as the economy has grown. One of the problems we've seen over the last
40 years is that we have seen all of this rising productivity growth but actually hasn't
been broadly shared, it's been captured by a thin slice of people at the top of the income
distribution. Even if unemployment stays low, automation
might worsen economic inequality, which is already more extreme in the US than it is
in most other advanced countries. But technology isn’t destiny. Governments decide how a society weathers
disruptions, and that worries people on both sides of the debate about the future of work. We’ve adopted policies that instead of really
trying to counteract the trend caused by technology and globalization and other things, we’ve
in many cases exacerbated them. We’ve put a wind in the back of them and
made them more extreme. And that’s a big problem. We will probably always be fascinated by the
prospect of robots taking our jobs. But if we focus on things we can’t really
control, we risk neglecting the things we can.
This video basically says, "Don't worry, there will still be jobs… just maybe not where you live, in your field, or anywhere near the payscale you earned before you were replaced by mass automation" T_T
I think the video misses the most important point, the problem isn't the speed of technological progress, it's the acceleration of the speed of technological progress. What we see right now is nothing compared to the technologies of the 30s. You have to ask yourself, at what point will technology progress so fast that humans will simply be unable to learn a new job in time (before it's obsolete again). And that still ignores that productivity gains will continue only increase the wealth of factory / business owners.
The factory of the future will be a windowless building with an ATM at the corner for it's owner.
As someone who understands the tech side well (computer science, complex adaptive systems, and robotics background) and the economics side poorly, I still disagree with the economist in this video.
I really do think this time automation is different. Eventually, every basic human need will be completely automated. Many typically "thinking" jobs will be automated such as the financial, design, and marketing industries. Researchers have already developed algorithms to "repair" minor problems in software, make art that people find enjoyable, and engineer structures.
People truly underestimate how much better a computer is at many tasks. They aren't just faster - they are unbiased, objective thinkers. People think that they can't figure out certain "unmeasurable" things, but we know that's not true: How to Measure Anything
We can't predict how humanity will respond well enough, but I don't think most people understand the scale to which computers are already impacting their lives, let alone how they will in the near future.
My personal prediction is this will be countered by a shrinking population, increased standard of living (eventually), and increased demand on nonessentials like the arts.
Ok, robot.
Excellent video that provides a good counterpoint to CGP Greys video
The 3 arguments I got from this video:
The first point doesn't hold any value in my opinion.
The 2nd point is an argument that's been addressed by people smarter than me, but basically, new technologies like amazon and google are exponentially more efficient, and require less workers. Kurzgesagt dedicated a whole video explaining why we shouldn't rely on new companies creating enough jobs.
I don't fully understand how labor productivity is measured, but just because it's not exponentially rising right now doesn't mean it won't soon.
I think we're at a tipping point, robots haven't yet replaced very many jobs, but soon we will have autonomous vehicles driving our trucks and ride hailing services. Robotic hands will be pouring our cocktails at bars. Grocery store shelves will be refilled by robots. The amount of jobs lost will be astronomical in maybe a decade. Those low skilled jobs were insanely important for me being able to afford college, and kids not having that option could be royal fucked if they don't have rich parents to pay for college.
It just seems foolish to assume that there will be just as many jobs available in other areas, just because that's what happened previously.
I've always hated it when economists make this argument, because it really doesn't hold up logically. They've got a pretty simple concept that you learn in econ 101 about comparative advantage. Machines have a comparative advantage over humans in terms of strength, so we let machines do the heavy lifting. Humans have a comparative advantage over machines in terms of adaptability, pattern recognition, abstract thought, and so we handle those areas, and will continue to handle them until machines surpass us. Once we lose our comparative advantages, there's no reason employ humans in roles dependent on those abilities, and we'll be replaced. For economists to argue that this won't happen, that we'll keep finding new areas in which humans have a comparative advantage big enough to maintain reasonable employment levels, is ridiculous. Either they're claiming that a basic principle of economics is wrong, or they're claiming without any real support or relevant expertise that machines will never surpass humans in those areas. They can quibble about how soon changes will come (though again, the pace of technological progress isn't really something they're qualified to argue), but to give the impression that this is never going to be a problem is absurd.