Technology causes high unemployment?

[Brian4Liberty]

It would still cost to make the robot and service it, transport goods, produce energy, and to provide the materials for the task the robots perform. Everything free? If the robots were free why would they be produced? No incentive.

You are seriously scaring me Zippy. I was just listening to a Donald Fagen play-list today.

[Neil Desmond]

imagine the extreme scenario. you have replicators that make and produce all your food. robot servants to make all your physicals like vehicles, houses, etc.
human effort is no longer required to provide for anyone's needs.
zero employment.
but yet, you have all your time to do what you want, you have home, transportation, food. your wealth is tremendous and you work none.
technology, increases our production which should lead to falling prices in a word of honest money. the falling prices is an increase in bounty for society.

I agree, except I don't like to call them "replicators" if you're talking about this kind of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Re...dular_Robotics

Basically, we might be be nearing completion of a "robotic" system that's universal and utility oriented:

Here's a version that I'm working on (a geometric "mock-up"):

[Neil Desmond]

if robots produce everything, prices are zero.

I agree; the general concept involved is called "post scarcity": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity

[Neil Desmond]

It would still cost to make the robot and service it, transport goods, produce energy, and to provide the materials for the task the robots perform. Everything free? If the robots were free why would they be produced? No incentive.

Not necessarily; consider:

http://www.i-to-i.com/why-do-people-volunteer.html

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/20...you-volunteer/

http://tribaltruth.org/2010/11/harri...nteering-more/


This presentation is insightful on the issue:

A few things I've written related to this subject/issue:

http://neiltalk.blogspot.com/2012/04...apitalism.html

http://neiltalk.blogspot.com/2012/04...demand-is.html

http://neiltalk.blogspot.com/2012/04...-scarcity.html

http://neiltalk.blogspot.com/2012/05...y-society.html


This guy's ideas are a bit dated or obsolete, but he makes some good points (not just models or drawings):

Reminds me of The Jetsons:

[Neil Desmond]

Consider the advantage of automation that can cover all tasks, such as building homes, structures, growing crops, cooking food (unless you enjoy cooking), etc. We may just be able to greatly reduce or maybe even end poverty, corruption, crime, need for prisons, need for people to travel to & from work every day (thus less pollution), and people will be free to do what they want.

[BlackTerrel]

why would someone build millions of robots if no one could buy them?
once people had one robot, their needs are met.
robot is a replacement for human effort required in meeting life needs.

I didn't say no one. But you have to create value to get value. I think creating value is going to become more and more difficult. Don't think 300 million Americans will.

[GeorgiaAvenger]

Temporarily, yes jobs are lost.

[Neil Desmond]

Temporarily, yes jobs are lost.

Yes, jobs are temporarily lost, for individuals, until they get retraining in something else or go (back, in some cases) to college so they can get a job in an emerging field or one that has not yet become obsolete. This is a problem (obviously) when you need income to pay bills, have mouths to feed, need a roof over your head, etc.

Maybe a better question to ask would be: is high unemployment itself necessarily a problem, when it comes to the welfare of the unemployed individuals and society? I think that the answer depends on whether or not people will be able to have food, shelter, transportation, clothes, money - in other words, the things people want and need (i.e., "stuff"), without income; and as a libertarian, I would also add to that question: without forcing someone else to work or taking part of someone else's money to give such individuals "stuff." I think that the answer is that unemployment is a problem only when the result is lack of access to "stuff" by individuals - the reason that people smashed machines when it came to the industrial revolution. I suppose people are not so inclined to smash assembly lines and automation these days because of welfare and some improvements in the quality of life for society; this goes to show that it's not unemployment in itself that's a problem, it's the adverse effect that it has on individuals (who lose their jobs) & their families thus lose access to "stuff." If they didn't lose access to "stuff" and it was because of automation, then I'd say that individuals would want to embrace it rather than have a desire to destroy it.

[Steven Douglas]

^^^ This.

I'm always amazed at how badly humans are in general at being 'futurists', as they project scenarios theoretically into the future, often into the vacuum of a LA-LA Land that will never exist, without considering the actual events and steps that got us to the present, and how labor factors in as crucial and indispensable along the way.

Technology and automation has done nothing but MULTIPLY, not diminish, the need and opportunities for unskilled labor. Every single step of the way.

If you made a list of all the unskilled labor jobs available in 1900, and compared that with the unskilled labor positions available in the worst times since, leading up to and including 2012, it becomes apparent that the list of the future is orders of magnitude greater, in both quantity and variety. They don't resemble each other at all, and that is ALL due to technology and automation. There were no telephone operator or electronic assembler jobs in 1900, because telephone tech was in its infancy, and there were no electronic devices to speak of.

What technology and automation does NOT do is guarantee security for any one type of unskilled labor. Wagoners and farriers wanting to remain employed by a transportation industry really did have to re-channel and retrain and adapt themselves to planes, trains and automobiles. When that happens, the unskilled labor cheese also gets relocated. Those who do the heavier lifting and carry water for the more skilled must also likewise adapt. That's not because their services in general are rendered obsolete; only that part of an entire industry that once required them has evolved, morphed and changed into something else.

ALL AUTOMATION comes from, and is dependent at myriad points, on labor. And always will be. There is no such thing as an automated system that did not arise from labor, and that does not require labor, including unskilled labor. The majority of equipment operators at any semiconductor wafer fabrication plant are UNSKILLED. And no matter how much automation is implemented, the question is NEVER whether or not unskilled labor will be required, but only how it can be most efficiently allocated, and not wasted.

Automation only refines labor and makes it more efficient and productive; it does not do away with it. And there is no such thing as dispensing with the need for labor, including unskilled labor. Ever. Automated systems require energy and maintenance. Tools are essential, and regardless how refined, how automated even these tools may be, they all require labor, including unskilled labor, to even exist.

Another point: Complex machines and systems have myriad components that come from different sources. Think of the number of parts and the amount it takes just to make a computer from all its constituent raw materials. There is NO SUCH THING as automated computer design and manufacture, just as there is NO SUCH THING as a disconnect from the positively staggering amount of unskilled labor required in the thousands upon thousands of processes required along the way.

On the other hand, there are opportunity vacuums going unfilled by the millions for specifically skilled labor.

[SOURCE]
“Companies all over are having a difficult time recruiting the kind of people they’re looking for,” said Robert Funk, chairman and chief executive of Express Employment Professionals, a national staffing firm based in Oklahoma City that helped some 335,000 people land jobs last year. “We currently have 18,000 open job orders we can’t fill.”

How can so many jobs remain unfilled with unemployment so high? One explanation is that many would-be workers lack the necessary skills to fill those positions. “There is higher demand for skilled jobs and less demand for unskilled positions than we’ve seen coming out of past recessions,” Mr. Funk said.

What the article fails to mention is that problem existed BEFORE the recession. And I lay that one at the doorstep of government involvement in education. They fucked up education the same way they fucked up the health care industry, with all the unintended consequences of protectionist 'accreditation' scams, and government guaranteed student loans and guaranteed funding to education that violated free market principles, and bid it all up so that it is ALL artificially expensive -- even to the point of giving rise to diploma mills and a black market for educational counterfeits.

So yes, retraining is vital for millions upon millions, but once again, just as with health care, pointy-headed morons are trying to figure out ways to PAY for something that is artificially overvalued from government meddling, and should never have been cost-prohibitive to anyone in the first place, rather than remove all the meddling influences so that the free market can take over and allocated funds with orders of magnitude more efficiency.

[Bohner]

That assumes additional demand existed for your widgets. Say the demand for your widgets did not change but technology still improved your productivity by 50%. That means you need fewer people to produce them so you lay off workers- you could get rid of one third of them and still maintain current production. But those workers were buying your widgets. Now they aren't because they don't have a job. Now you are selling fewer so you again need fewer workers. More layoffs.

If you are producing 50% more widgets for the same cost, then you could afford to lower your prices for widgets significantly. Sure, the laid off people are now temporarily unemployed but the rest of society now benefits from the cheaper widgets.

We have seen that happening with our economy in recent years. Companies started laying off workers (a lot of the early cutbacks were not because companies were themselves actually losing revenue but because they EXPECTED lower sales due to the recession hitting which actually made it worse and self- fulfilling). Now there are more people not working. They have less to spend on buying stuff so sales of goods and services go down. These same companies see the sales declines and trim the workforce further. It is very hard to get the cycle to reverse itself and get business to hire and give people more money to spend again which increased demand for goods and services which encourages more hiring.

What you are talking about here is the result of the GFC not the rise in productivity. This argument of technology leading to mass unemployment has gone on pver a hundred years and has no factual basis behind it.