My question is whether the silly leftists running some states will try and use those very noticeable changes to protect unskilled laborers.
There's three quite extraordinary pieces of dogma which always come up every single time automation is discussed.
First, that it only affects 'unskilled labourers' - that it can be solved simply by getting more education. That was true a hundred years ago, but not in the 21st century. It's not necessary for machines to do 100% of a given job title to threaten the sector; if they can do 'only' half of the work, in most cases that will mean that only half as many humans will be employed to do what's left. Take doctors for example: A lot of the most delicate surgery is already being done by machines. We've already got vending-machine type height, weight and blood pressure devices littered around shopping malls; how long before all the basic "turn your head and cough" diagnostic routine of your local GP are added to the mix? Computers can stay up to date on all the voluminous medical literature far more easily and accurately than any human doctor can. There'll always be doctors for the foreseeable future, but that doesn't mean there'll be enough work for the same
number.
Second - and even more baffling - is the magical thinking that there's some natural or economic law dictating that new jobs will be invented in sufficient quantity to replace any lost to automation. Yes, technology opens up new possibilities, but often the numbers employed by those possibilities are relatively small. In 2014 most if not all of the
top 25 occupations in the US were already around 50 years ago and more. Mobile app designers do not feature prominently on the list. Even IT jobs in general don't make the top twenty-five; software developers (#26), computer support specialists (#32) and computer systems analysts (#34)
combined account for fewer jobs than general and operations managers at #5. And yet projections range
from 35% to
47% of current jobs at risk from automation in the next few decades. Declaring that somehow that won't be an issue because of 'new opportunities' is magical thinking at its finest.
But the
most amazing thing is the supposition that human workers can or should be made to compete with machines; that keeping wages low or reducing them even further is somehow a solution. Yet the obvious fact is that in all cases where something
can be done by machines, they will always eventually be better at it than horses and humans; stronger, faster, smarter, more durable, more accurate and reliable. Again, it may not be the case that 100% of such work is done by machines - some seasonal fruit-picking is still done by hand, after all - but as unemployment puts downward pressure on wages ultimately it would affect all workers, and humans couldn't possibly hope to win. At best, keeping steady wages or lowering them might slow the process by five or ten years, but it's obviously not a long-term solution.
That is a proposition that virtually all the benefits from humanity's thousands of years of scientific technological progress should accrue to the tiny handful of people who don't have to work for their living, while everyone else competes against the machines and against each other in a desperate race to the bottom.
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Are there any real solutions? Banning automation is obviously absurd. So far the two I've seen which
might be plausible are:
A) An otherwise-unconditional low income supplement or negative income tax replacing most conditional or means-tested welfare. That would mean that even large numbers of unemployed people can still live, and still contribute their economic demand to the country rather than facing the recession and depression which would otherwise result from mass unemployment. That might be part of a solution, but rather than a something-for-nothing scheme I'm more partial towards...
B) Further reducing standard working weeks so that a smaller amount of work is still carried out by 95+% of the population. A century ago an average working week was over 50 hours; if that were still the case today unemployment rates would be around 20%! If low employment rates are likely to be an ongoing problem in the future, which they obviously are, an obvious part of the solution should be to continue on the same trend we've already started. Instead of a standard 40 hour week, bring it gradually down so that in twenty years a 21 hour working week covers those 47% of jobs lost to automation.