Nearly 30 years ago, Barry Jones, a rather brilliant Aussie bloke (he won big on quiz game shows, then went into politics and became a Minister for Science) wrote Sleepres, Wake, a book in which he predicted that work in the future will be a privilege of the most capable, while the various plodders will have to live a life of involuntary leisure. The book is extremely well thought out and well worth a read.
But IMHO it (and the OP article) neglects to consider the following alternative: the unskilled will continue to work earning wages which allow a fairly comfortable existence, while being ever-decreasing relative to the wages of the skilled. This outcome seems more likely considering the basic human nature, and looks in fact like what is coming to pass: the modestly-well-off have cleaners, lawn-mowers, gardeners, nannies, guards etc, soon these may be supplemented by cooks, shoppers, drivers, etc. I do not see a limit as to how far such a chain of personal assistants can reach.
the modestly-well-off have cleaners, lawn-mowers, gardeners, nannies, guards etc, soon these may be supplemented by cooks, shoppers, drivers, etc. I do not see a limit as to how far such a chain of personal assistants can reach.
Having human servants may be a status thing, but consider just how good machines might get at doing literally everything on your list in say 50 years time. Sure obviously some niches will remain, perhaps for a very long time. But will these really be so labour intensive that they will be enough to eat up most of technological unemployment?
Lets do some math here. To simplify lets just consider the bell curve distribution for IQ, to add another simplification to our model lets say basically anyone with an IQ below two standard deviations above the mean is obsolete for anything but the kind of service work you describe. How many servants would a high IQ person need to eat up to not have society arrive at a large fraction of unemployed? Is this a realistic number?
That’s an interesting question to consider. Some numbers I pulled from Wolfram Alpha indicates that 97.72% of people are below two standard deviations above the mean, so you would need 44 jobs generated per person after rounding up.
I think what D_Alex might be getting at when he references a chain of personal assistants is that your personal staff can themselves have assistants. I.E, you can generate even more jobs by having one of your gardeners come home to his own chef, or one of your chefs might come home to her own freshly handled garden.
Another source of jobs is jobs that involve a fair amount of waiting and or response times. People are still having trouble meeting targets for things of that nature:
It is not impossible to slice response time targets in half. The main reason that’s impractical is because we can’t or are not willing employ the number of people necessary to do it or it isn’t economical. If we essentially had functionally unlimited resources to employ people with, and some substantial number of people who just wanted jobs, there are a substantial number of places where we can try to hire people to try to guarantee faster response times.
This also applies to almost any position that currently involves waiting that isn’t normally thought of as a first responder.
As an example, my family missed an appointment for getting drywall repaired and now we have to wait a week for another appointment. Let’s assume drywall repair is hard to design a robot for (or if it isn’t, pretend this is a more robot difficult task) If we could have a drywall repair guy fix our house the same day it got damaged, our life is certainly seems better then it was when I was noticing a damaged part of my house for more than a week. Why can’t we do that?
A standard explanation would be that it’s not economical to hire that many workers to boost repair speed for cosmetic repairs like that.
But if you’re in a post scarcity society where you desperately need jobs, it seems like it should be economical to get these speeds better.
Nearly 30 years ago, Barry Jones, a rather brilliant Aussie bloke (he won big on quiz game shows, then went into politics and became a Minister for Science) wrote Sleepres, Wake, a book in which he predicted that work in the future will be a privilege of the most capable, while the various plodders will have to live a life of involuntary leisure. The book is extremely well thought out and well worth a read.
But IMHO it (and the OP article) neglects to consider the following alternative: the unskilled will continue to work earning wages which allow a fairly comfortable existence, while being ever-decreasing relative to the wages of the skilled. This outcome seems more likely considering the basic human nature, and looks in fact like what is coming to pass: the modestly-well-off have cleaners, lawn-mowers, gardeners, nannies, guards etc, soon these may be supplemented by cooks, shoppers, drivers, etc. I do not see a limit as to how far such a chain of personal assistants can reach.
Having human servants may be a status thing, but consider just how good machines might get at doing literally everything on your list in say 50 years time. Sure obviously some niches will remain, perhaps for a very long time. But will these really be so labour intensive that they will be enough to eat up most of technological unemployment?
Lets do some math here. To simplify lets just consider the bell curve distribution for IQ, to add another simplification to our model lets say basically anyone with an IQ below two standard deviations above the mean is obsolete for anything but the kind of service work you describe. How many servants would a high IQ person need to eat up to not have society arrive at a large fraction of unemployed? Is this a realistic number?
That’s an interesting question to consider. Some numbers I pulled from Wolfram Alpha indicates that 97.72% of people are below two standard deviations above the mean, so you would need 44 jobs generated per person after rounding up.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/firstlady.asp would seem to indicate that as of today, that is a substantial amount of personal staff, but certainly not an out of the question amount.
I think what D_Alex might be getting at when he references a chain of personal assistants is that your personal staff can themselves have assistants. I.E, you can generate even more jobs by having one of your gardeners come home to his own chef, or one of your chefs might come home to her own freshly handled garden.
Another source of jobs is jobs that involve a fair amount of waiting and or response times. People are still having trouble meeting targets for things of that nature:
http://www.yourcanterbury.co.uk/news/ambulances_failing_to_meet_target_response_times_1_1022605
It is not impossible to slice response time targets in half. The main reason that’s impractical is because we can’t or are not willing employ the number of people necessary to do it or it isn’t economical. If we essentially had functionally unlimited resources to employ people with, and some substantial number of people who just wanted jobs, there are a substantial number of places where we can try to hire people to try to guarantee faster response times.
This also applies to almost any position that currently involves waiting that isn’t normally thought of as a first responder.
As an example, my family missed an appointment for getting drywall repaired and now we have to wait a week for another appointment. Let’s assume drywall repair is hard to design a robot for (or if it isn’t, pretend this is a more robot difficult task) If we could have a drywall repair guy fix our house the same day it got damaged, our life is certainly seems better then it was when I was noticing a damaged part of my house for more than a week. Why can’t we do that?
A standard explanation would be that it’s not economical to hire that many workers to boost repair speed for cosmetic repairs like that.
But if you’re in a post scarcity society where you desperately need jobs, it seems like it should be economical to get these speeds better.