Yesterday I posted about the singularity and how it seems to be a front for exceptionally unpleasant people. In the process of looking into that Martin Ford and his book "Lights in the Tunnel" was mentioned a lot on Wikipedia (I think he was stealth advertising) and it raises a problem that I'd been kind of hazily aware of, not least because of a Paul Krugman article I read last week.
The essential idea Ford (and others) puts forward is that with improvements in technology and increasing automation an increasingly large sector of the economy will not require human workers at all. While this has already happened to an extent automation up to this point has mostly complemented human workers, that is to say labour saving devices meant fewer employees doing more work and other jobs created by the technology taking up the slack. Well for the past couple of decades that slack has been taken up by the service sector. The bad news is automation of the service sector seems to be imminent, with self service checkouts and Online shopping we are already seeing the beginnings of this. In a piece written a few years ago (so it sadly doesn't cover the most recent financial crisis) Marshall Brain wrote a piece detailing how rapid and large scale automation of the service sector is likely to be.(Marshall Brain is the founder of HowStuffWorks.com with a surname like that I suppose it was inevitable)
Something he highlights, which in retrospective seems painfully obvious, is the existence of Jobless Recoveries. Traditional economists have explained away improved growth alongside continuing unemployment because jobs are apparently a "lagging indicator" but it would seem increased automation would explain this equally well if not better. Ford notes that offshoring is linked to automation, deskilled jobs and computers / high bandwidth long distance communication allow jobs to be much more easily exported to places where labour is cheapest. However with automation seemingly poised to replace these jobs altogether it seems China and India's current economic booms may be shortlived.
The general way of things up to now, or at least up to recently, has been that as automation has eliminated some jobs the slack has been taken up elsewhere but as Brain points out (scroll down to "Creating new jobs") there seems to be little place for new jobs to be found, Ford argues an exception is Green Jobs and building a renewable energy infrastructure but even that is short term, once its built the new of jobs required to maintain it will not take up anywhere near all the slack. Worse still even in the near term it wont just be low skilled jobs that will be automated, as mentioned in Krugman's article above and by Ford in an excerpt from his book.
This leads to two possible scenarios, the more optimistic one being that the massive efficiency increases of robotic labour are shared with the general population and the large numbers of people placed into long term, or likely lifelong unemployment are given a decent standard of living funded by the massive surplus robots can create. This is potentially possible and I'm inclined to believe that to some extent the Middle Eastern and now Spanish uprisings are the first wave of backlash against economic automation. The truly massive levels of youth unemployment, Spain has a Youth unemployment rate of 45% are leading to the young taking to the streets and demanding change. They may not get it but it is a potentially hopeful sign.
The less optimistic scenario is much less optimistic. The evidence of US wages being stagnant since the 70s would suggest the benefits of automation and increased efficiency have flowed solely to a very small part of the population who are at the very top of the pile. Without intervention automation, with massively reduced labour costs and no wages going to an increasing slice of the population, the rich will get even richer even faster. We have seen evidence for this in the aftermath of the 2008 crash with Billionaires getting much richer even as the rest of society faces financial crisis and austerity measures. Indeed austerity measures are a good example of this trend, with the poorer in society becoming worse off even as the amount of wealth in society increases. Then you have movements like the Tea Party wanting to cut Medicare and privatise social security, this does not bode well for a future American society looking after the permanently unemployed.
Indeed, as an increasingly large amount of the population becomes essentially surplus social unrest could well increase. This however may not happen due to increasingly powerful surveillance systems in the West being used to prevent organisation and action. While western troops / police might not fire on civilians (the 2008 RNC Protests suggest that they might well do so) Blackwater / Xe mercenaries and automated drones definitely would. The counter to this is a probably vain hope the human elements of the military (if they existed) would revolt if this happened. Thus there is something of a timelimit, once humans have been removed from military and policing operations (if that is indeed possible) the super wealthy minority would likely be utterly secure and looked after by automated systems and robotics. This in turn could lead to a slow genocide as the majority of the population were left to starve to death or perhaps even a more rapid active genocide.
Three things are factors in this happening. Firstly there is the speed and range of automation, if for whatever reason important parts of infrastructure can't be automated or automation is slow allowing things to build to a head a more egalitarian distribution of the benefits of automation may occur. Secondly there is the issue of Awareness if people become aware they're likely to be out of a job permanently in a decade they may well start to look to softening their landing before they become powerless. This is likely why there is no mention of automation in the mainstream media. Thirdly there is the possibility of robotic efficiency being so great that it is inevitably shared more widely. This a very optimistic scenario but there may simply be an upper limit to what the tiny elite can use and control meaning the crumbs left to the rest of society are big enough to allow the global majority to lead decent lives. I certainly wouldn't count on it happening but it is possible I suppose.
I think point two has the most potential to avert catastrophe for the majority which is why I'm going to make a request of you. Spread the word about this. You need not link my blog post, just cherry pick links or even just explain it to people you know. This is seemingly a major factor in the current state of things and yet no one is talking about it, not even dedicated left wing media outfits. People need to know this stuff.
Here are a few key conversation points:
1)Jobless recoveries amid continuing growth.
2)Robots in the service sector, especially self service checkouts, What will replace those jobs?
3)Krugman and Ford's point about higher skilled jobs such as radiology being replaceable.
4)If those jobs can't be replaced what on earth is going to happen?
Spreading the word as widely as possible can only be a beneficial thing.
I forgot to work this into the text but Jeremy Rifkin also covered this topic in The End of Work but I can't find much to cite from this but still, worth knowing about if you're interested in the topic.
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