The problem is that we have an economic model that has been defined by a small percentage of the public to benefit that small percentage of the public.

what we need is an economic ideology that is controlled by the public and is designed to improve the quality of life for the majority in the most effective way possible instead of maximizing trade and work whether it improves life or not.

the current system is designed to enable the corporations to take a profit every time something happens even if the public doesn't need their help. and in many cases these transactions or jobs don't improve the quality of life for the consumer they just receive mareting to convince them to buy buy buy and the do so.

Holy shit, Kent. That "conversation" is unreal.
It is my contention that transnational corporations do not even think about what to do with all the people in the world other than bundle them at a few pennies a piece to make their profits.
With this jobless recovery, it should be apparent that the wealthy have figured out that they do not need the middle class. The poor will serve just as well.
Love your title and article.

Yeah, those automated response things are the best, they'll replace the human types very soonly!! Teehehee! Like talking to the Eliza proggie from way back.

"Hello. How are you today?"

"My butt hurts."

"That is very interesting that your butt hurts."

:D

Rated.

Kent, this is an excellent piece...I have been thinking a lot about right livelihood lately, as I am incredibly fortunate to be in that...so...presently...I am grateful that being a customer service tech is not my right livelihood...those for whom it is must be horrified to be replaced by a program...xox

I still want C3PO to be my best pal, so maybe you didn't hit pay dirt with me today. (I will take R2D2 in a pinch, but he's a little short for my tastes)

This is nothing short of scary
rated with hugs

Wow. It is really programmed to say, "I am a virtual agent so I can't answer everything"?

zachery, I agree. We could start by just measuring and reporting the right statistics. Even if a plan followed later, it would help to report how bad things are now. I think the problem may be that no politician wants to go first, since undoubtedly when we switch to the new measuring, we'd see rot all over and the opposition party would claim it just started yesterday. Alas.

o'steph, I agree with you about the need for a middle class having fallen by the wayside. And I agree on the transnational issue.

Bonnie, thanks. :)

Tink, I just added at the end of the article a hyperlink to the psychiatrist program I was alluding to. You might want to check that out.

Social Darwinism can be brutal in its scope, and almost devoid of feeling. What happens to the overruled jobless whose jobs were outsourced or taken over by technology? They perhaps die away.
Any Social Darwinism can kill a human being thru sheer ignorance of any ultimate comsequences..
Rated

Obviously, I can't spell today!
"n" instead of "m", there.......
*sigh*

My skin is crawling as I read.

About that hyperlink I added to the psychiatrist—I didn't invent the Eliza program, I just learned about it in school. Though I did take a programming from Joseph Weizenbaum, who did invent Eliza. Many of us wrote programs that imitated his. Someone at Stanford also did a program called Parry, the Paranoid Patient, that did the other side of such an interview, and I hooked my program up to his (clumsily—we couldn't get a direct connection so had to type in again what the other was saying by hand). The pointer I've added to this article is to an interaction between those two entities.

Clearly the programmer for that also works for insurance and credit card phone intallation systems. Please enter all this information, please dial this number, please wait, your problem needs another agent, please hold, this extension does not exist, click.

Robin, I agree, having a job these days is good fortune. The moreso because jobs and health care are so intertwined.

Abby, sorry. I'll write more about robots another day. They aren't all negative. But competing with them for jobs in a world that doesn't feed or care for people who don't have jobs really is awful.

Linda, sorry to scare you. I guess I should have saved this up to be a Halloween post, eh?

Dorinda, apparently it is. Kind of a wimp-out really. But what's worse is that it doesn't realize it's copping out so it's willing to repeat itself on the matter.

PW, I'm not sure anyone tracks or even wants to know about those whose jobs are lost to technology. We should want to know. But I hear precious little discussion of it. The book I'm reading right now, The Betrayal of American Prosperity by Clyde Prestowitz, has some outstanding points to make on the subject. I may do a book review at some point.

Oriyoki, I do see a common theme, yes. :)

Sheesh. Just sheesh. I hate having to ask a company for help and go through this. r

Back in 1970, in my last year of high school, we watched a documentary film on the future of economics. One of the people interviewed was J. K. Galbraith, and he addressed the subject of automation. Even back then it was clear that automation would eventually lead to less demand for humans, especially in manufacturing.

In Galbraith's view, automation would lead to an era of prosperity. His solution to the human worker problem was that people would work fewer hours a week, but automation would provide so much prosperity that the average standard of living could be maintained with fewer hours of work. This would mean that people would have more leisure time with no reduction in the quality of life in other areas.

Perhaps Galbraith's "solution" was unrealistic. I don't know if the additional prosperity provided by automation would really be sufficient to allow people to get by on fewer hours of work. But what strikes me is that Galbraith's solution represented "macro" thinking in terms of how automation could be made to work with the whole system, with all workers. What we have today is "micro" thinking in terms of individuals. When automation is implemented, rather than thinking in terms of how to optimize the system to the benefit of the most people, we think in terms of optimizing the system to the benefit of the fewest possible people. Industries are automated, the "excess" people are disposed of, and what happens to them is their problem.

Your question, "what is the plan to use all the people," is an example of a macro or systems question, and we need to ask more questions like that.

Your post asks all the right questions. No one in government or the global corporate world is willing to answer. My guess is that all of us need to abandon the global marketplace and set up our own local/internet economies as we basically have been doing with craigslist/local currencies. There IS a person out there that can answer your software question, but Norton won't be the source of those answers. We need to employ each other.

Bernadine, right. One cringes any more at the thought of calling technical support even knowing one might get a person. They all follow scripts now so are barely more than robots anyway. But this just adds insult to injury.

Mishima, I appreciate the discussion you offered here. I'm not going to respond right away. What you say requires time to digest. But I made notes about a post I'd like to write in response on another day. Thanks!

Ardee, yes, returning to the local and sustainable has considerable appeal. In fact, I could probably answer the problem I was having myself. My only goal in contacting these guys was that I knew others were going to have the same problem as I was and I figured it was worth trying to reach their command central in order to let them know this was going to be a pattern problem. One problem with global distribution is that the least little problem gets replicated a lot of times.

Actually, continuing my thought to Ardee, let me add also: A friend of mine discussing how to price a product once said that if you have a product with a lot of bugs, you have to price it higher. A very buggy program should be priced at $10,000 or you'll never be able to afford all the phone calls you'll get about it. If you're going to price something at $50, it had better really work. That seems odd, that the better program should cost less. But the point is that if it doesn't work, you're going to be bankrupted by the number of service calls you get. This is the problem with inexpensive programs is that they just can't afford to let customers reach a real human.

damn Kent, I had better luck playing Zork w/o a manual when I was just typing in random words trying to get my character to move and do things
how frustrating!

Remember that our basic concept of money evolved back when human labor was the bottleneck to operating society. Without automation, there was always enough work for people who chose to work. So distributing money relative to output made sense, if we assumes that money reflected contribution to society.

These days, money is almost completely decoupled from actual production of things of value to society, and its distribution has very little to do with the contribution made by those who acquire it (though we love the _story_ that those who contribute reap the rewards).

The problem is that automation fundamentally makes fewer people necessary, but without some other way of distributing the wealth, we those people will starve without jobs to get money to share in the bounty that doesn't actually require all of us working to enjoy.

Mishima666 nails the problem: managers prefer—indeed, are trained!—to turn excess productivity into profits by reducing headcount, rather than by continuing to pay everyone the same and just let them go home earlier and earlier. That's simply how we as a society have chose to respond to productivity increases. It benefits shareholders tremendously, but no one else.

(And by the way, take a look at equity concentration statistics sometime if you think "the shareholders" are all of us. I pretty much guarantee no one reading this article is even remotely in the league of the people who actually control about 85% of all equities in the country.)

"I think there is a world market for maybe five human beings."

This is a tough issue. It's addressed in any number of early works in science fiction, many of which seem to assume a society of philosophers, artists, and writers; robots do all the work, and we're all left to pursue our higher interests. Not very realistic.

On the other hand, I can hope that we've seen this trend before, even if it's been much slower in coming, and we can adapt. In 1900, 41% of the U.S. workforce was employed in agriculture. In 2000, it was 1.9%, dropping with what looks like an exponential decay. We're looking at a comparable shift, perhaps, over the course of ten or twenty years instead of a century. We'll see what happens. I expect it will be painful.

Julie, I know what you mean. Zork was probably more self-aware than this apparently-stateless bot is.

Stever, thanks for the very thoughtful comments. I took more notes, as I did for Mishima's comment above, that I hope will yield a whole post sometime. But I agree with you on the point about fewer people being needed. So it's a special shame that population continues to rise at a time when we just don't need more population and frankly can't really sustain it.

Rob, good quote. Where is it from? :) They say journalists are always covering the previous war. The problem with the example you offer is that on previous occasions, people still were needed in the equation. The automation was far from ubiquitous. But that proportion is ever-shifting in the modern world, perhaps accelerating. It becomes a kind of Ponzi scheme.

I just more people could find right livelihood rather than having to do this kind of work simply because it may offer health benefits...that's pretty sad...xox

Nora clearly fails the Turing test

I'd have no problem with outsourcing jobs to cyberspace with a couple of conditions . . .

(1) the cyber entity is competent to do the job, and has competent human backup

(2) the productivity benefits are shared across class strata, and not simply aggregated to those who've managed to get the reins in their hands through a combination of sociopathy and luck

Excellent post, as expected! Automation may theoretically work, if the standards of living of the people affected (replaced by robots) remain unchanged (in the same line as what mishima666 discussed about Galbraith's view). Obviously, this is not feasible, as we saw with the outsourcing of US jobs to other humans located in different parts of the planet. I personally know several people who have been replaced (i.e., their position outsourced) and it’s not pretty. None were able to maintain the same standards of living.

its counterintuitive but it seems clear now, increases/improvements in technology can increase wealth/class disparity. how a society deals with this, or doesnt, is a true test of its character.

Robin, I wish health care were decoupled from employment. I think if it were, it would free people tremendously in their choice of employment.

Roy, I'm not sure that's a complete list of conditions. I'll have to think about it. But it's a reasonable start and worth some thought. Thanks!

Caracalla, the fact that we need to have people make things in order to have wealth is the problem. True wealth is not the creation of things, it's just getting rid of needs and then accommodating whatever can be sustainably and equitably done with the resources that remain.

Kanuk, I agree. Not pretty. The book The Betrayal of American Prosperity makes the point that the tallying of wealth is done at a societal level and often shows that less effect than has happened. For example, a small number of elites may increase their wealth by offshoring at the expense of a number of people of lesser wealth, yet if you view the averages, it balances out. Those that lose their jobs are expected to get others, but the issues of retraining, of having to work up a new ladder of salary, etc. are not addressed. Automation has all these same issues.

vzn, yes, that's a nice way of putting it. I agree.

Truth be told...it is as if human to human contact is a terrible thing to a business..a thing to avoid at all costs.
When did people talking to people become passe?

Great White, I think it's when someone offered Big Business a cheaper solution. All business anymore is about reducing the bottom line and preparing one's company for sale based on tight quarterly economic reports. It's not about the long-term, it's about short-term cashing out.

Heh.

Not only have you written software more capable of sustaining a conversation -- you've written software more capable of learning (the animal program, remember?)

I look at this a bit differently. To me, what's striking about this is their acceptance of this very low quality of interaction. NOT that they'd use automation, or encourage you to try automation first, but that they would actually front their support with something so completely awful.

As for reduced work, prosperity, and Galbraith -- the flaw in this ointment is that it doesn't work to reduce hours. In fact, what we see is that jobs that can be automated, disappear -- and those of us who do things that can't be automated, actually work longer and harder.

Not because we're forced to, but because to actually do the sort of job that's can't be automated, requires time and focus, and can't be done by a lot of people working a little at a time.

Automation HAS brought us prosperity. Galbraith wasn't wrong about that. We are richer than we were then, in ways that aren't easily quantifiable. Consider how much longer an automobile of today lasts. How do you quantify that? Medicines are more effective. Computers! And products that could not have been imagined then.

The sticking point isn't about prosperity. It's always been about "what do you do when our propserity is not based on massive amounts of human labor"?

The key question is -- can we find things for people to do that has value -- for them, for society? We will have real problems if we can't. People don't need jobs -- but they do need to be needed, and to be engaged in something positive.

Bob, I do remember my Animal game, as you probably knew. It hadn't seemed relevant, but now that I think about it, something that learns—even in so simplistic a fashion—might be quite useful in a support situation. :) But, as I'm sure you noticed, even just the ability to remember (much less learn) would be helpful.

You probably remember, since you were around at the time (late 1970's), that I wrote a computerized emulator of myself at one point, for the sake of my then-girlfriend who was away on vacation and used to log in remotely to chat. I was going to be away on vacation myself, which as you know in those days of the ARPANET didn't always leave me able to connect up remotely, so I wanted to leave her something to talk to. It had only a limited set of things to say, but it kept track of them and knew that when it was running out of things to say it should try to extricate itself from the conversation rather than repeat itself. (Story for another day, abbreviated: It was buggy and didn't end up working right on that score. But that was 30 years ago, and I wrote it from spare parts in an afternoon and without a QA department, so we'll make some allowances for me that maybe I wouldn't make for Symantec.) What's amazing is how Symantec's entire business is based on trust and how incredibly little trust this program engenders.

Your points on societal questions are well-taken. I took more notes for the blog post I plan to do in followup to this post based on comments from various people, including you, Stever, and Mishima.

Thanks for dropping by!

Yep, Kent, I have so much to say about this, I don't even know where to begin. I'll say two things:

I think you said a whole lot with this: "Maybe if we can just get the Roberts Court to declare that Nora here is a person, we can count her in the census and start to see that really the jobs are coming back."

Until we, as a society, learn that capitalism is not the solution to every social problem, that profit margin is not the single most important aspect of a business, capitalism will continue to BE a problem. I tend to see capitalism as a luxury, something that can be mixed with other components to provide some level of personal reward, but it has gone WAY past that level.

RATED
___________

Rick, thanks for the interesting perspective. We agree, it seems, and yet it's interesting to hear the specific manner in which you and others have expressed your agreement. Lots to ponder.

It was HAL 9000! Fabulous post. Perhaps the collective hive mind could tell me which particular Kurt Vonnegut novel had all the people in the world outsourced by computers and robots. Was it Ice Nine?

Perhaps it is time to uncouple 'labour' from 'income'. Robot manufactories may well produce goods of quality for low prices but unless the potential customers have sufficient funds available to them to purchase those goods, they will not get sold.

Credit allows people to spend tomorrow's earnings. Credit can only go so far and it seems to have pretty well gone as far as it can. What purpose would be served by allowing a credit card holder to spend money that he won't live long enough to re-pay?

Perhaps we might look at the idea of doing away with personal inheritance in favour of generational inheritance so that every person born starts out with 'shares' in public companies and in the wealth of his/her nation. We could retain capitalism, which would allow for anyone interested in the 'game' of amassing a large amount of wealth to do so, with the understanding that ultimately the wealth of a nation belongs to all the people of that nation and that, upon his death, it would be returned to the nation by way of a birthright inheritance, shared with all children at birth.

Creativity cannot be outsourced to a machine and that is what will save us from the scrap heap. monkey fingered.

Kent, there is a book that addresses the issues you raise. It is The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology, and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford. It is an ebook, available for free in PDF format, at http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/

Here are a couple of selections:

"What if technology progresses to the point where a substantial fraction of the jobs now performed by people are instead performed autonomously by machines or computers? Is that likely, or even possible? And if it is, what are the implications for our economy?" [opening sentences]

" . . . offshoring is really a precursor of automation. Offshoring is what you do when you have some technology, but not enough to fully automate a job. Just as clunky drive-through banks were eventually made obsolete by ATMs, so many jobs that are currently being offshored will, in the future, end up being fully automated. This trend was already discernable in 2004, when an article in InformationWeek pointed out that 'low-wage foreign labor may pose a threat to American call-center workers, but their counterparts in countries such as India and the Philippines themselves face being replaced by increasingly sophisticated voice-automation technology.'” [pp. 55-56]

When the operation of society depends upon people buying stuff for money they have to have a source to obtain the money. Under either off-shoring or automation the money goes somewhere else, not to the people who are supposed to buy the products. So the solution is for the government, which turns money out by the ton on a printing press, to give the money to people to buy the stuff. Whether or not they work for it is irrelevant. If the work is done elsewhere or without people simply doesn't matter. How to distribute the money and on what basis is a different and rather interesting problem.

Caracalla, I think my point of view is non-standard, and my terminology was a bit vague, so don't assume I'm just regurgitating something you've heard elsewhere. If you've heard it elsewhere, it's by independent creation, not because I'm repeating someone else's line. Please for limited purpose of making this one point, count “services” in that particular remark as part of “making things.”

Consider the following thought exercise: Suppose there is enough corn in the world to feed everyone but I won't give you some unless you have money. Suppose that to get money, you have to devise a good or a service to make money in order to get it. Some people would say that's intrinsically good because now I've made someone happy if they've bought the service and now you “deserve” to be fed. But the theory of modern advertising suggests it's possible to get people to buy things they don't want, to fill their day with stuff that doesn't matter, to create needs they did not have. I'm not really arguing that this is always the case, but I'm suggesting it might be.

To borrow from your other conversation yesterday about physics, consider this an analog of wave/particle duality, and consider that I'm saying that sometimes the “push” model of consumerism we use now is good but sometimes it is not. Sometimes “pull” is worth contemplating. And I don't think by at least some analysis we can always be said to be richer if I force you to create a service no one is calling for just to get fed. For one thing, your doing and promoting your service consumes resources beyond your existence and someone has to cut down a tree or use up nuclear fuel or borrow from wind energy to support your extra use. Are we richer for doing that? Are you now deserving of the corn you were not deserving of before? The sense in which goods vs. services matters is that goods are maybe (but maybe not) more resource-intensive. But services still are somewhat more resource intensive than doing nothing. I think this is not the entirety of the dilemma that faces us, but I think it's a piece that is not always discussed. Does that help?

Encoded in the system of free-enterprise we live in is a notion that the system will force us to do something and that something is better than nothing. That might be so. But it is not necessarily so. It goes unconsidered.

I skipped several other very interesting replies to respond to that one from Caracalla. Sorry about that. I'm reading them all. It just triggered something I wanted to get to while I was thinking about it. I'll go back and get caught up in responses a little later.

ONL, I don't know the piece personally, but a Google search says the work you're thinking of is Player Piano, his first novel, published in 1952.

Skypixieo, some interesting thoughts there. I have a blog planned on some topics related to that at some point. I hope you'll stop back now and then.

BBE, I studied Artificial Intelligence in school and I've watched what has happened with it over the last few decades. I think creativity is more mechanical in a great many cases than you think and while I don't look forward to or see a need for The Singularity, I do think the issue is a real concern. Certainly, too, the possibility of something “adequately creative” for a great many situations is likely to confront us much sooner. I wouldn't get too comfortable, in other words. The situation bears watching.

Mishima, that's a really great quote. Thanks for sharing the cross-reference with us!

Jan, I think there's a difficulty in selling that idea, but in some ways it's the logical end result that almost seems like it will happen in a free world. When and how is the hard part. Then again, if the world became less free, things might play out very differently, with some people hogging resources and others being left to .. cope. This may become the more practical likelihood if Climate Change sets in and resources run scarce. The scenario you're discussing mostly works only if there is plenty of food and a stable population and a reasonable theory of waste disposal such that we're in a sustainable steady state.

Caracalla, a lot of the issues you raise are artifacts of (or closely coupled with) capitalist systems. But certainly it's possible to devise (not that I'm advocating, I'm just speaking abstractly) a government which simply directs part of its community to make enough food to feed people, including distribution, and disallowing things like lawsuits. Those are each things that are decisions of communities, not things that are fundamental to human nature. I'm sure you can find tribes that have lived according to a division of labor where some simply “find the food” and everyone eats it. Individuals who don't find food probably have other jobs, but not because of an “economy” in the sense of one-for-one trade of action for food item. Ultimately, at a societal level, if carrying certain people is a burden and they provide nothing back, there will be strife. But that may depend a great deal on how much burden. There are certainly web sites that thrive on having people just visit them by mistake (and one some days one might think OS one of them) because it ups their ad numbers, so the bar for what it takes to be a “contributing member” might be remarkably low in some cases.