X-Message-Number: 940
From:  (David Krieger)
Subject: Re: Luddites
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 92 9:51:18 PDT

>   #935 - Freeman [Re: Luddites]
> Date: Mon, 29 Jun 92 13:07:14 -0400
> From: 
> 
> I'm saying here that I have reason to believe that they [the past
> and future effects of technology on employment] will be
> different.  In the past, everyone had about the same abilities, and
> technology provided better ways to use those abilities,
> without any serious threat of making those abilities obsolete.  This
> lead to an improved standard of living for the average person.

What you are describing hasn't been true since the industrial 
revolution began.  Countless times in the past, occupations and
the detailed technical abilities associated with them were "obsoleted"
(Have you verbed your favorite adjective today?) by technological 
developments.  A blacksmith, tanner, or buggy-whip maker has a large
body of specialized technical knowledge (and if you disagree, make a
horseshoe and mail it to me).  Civilization did not collapse, and most
of these artisans did not starve, because human beings, unlike other
animals, are retrainable.  A colony of leafcutter ants displaced by a
lumber operation cannot retrain to become carnivorous.  A telephone
operator displaced by a computerized switch bank can retrain to become
anything.

> In the future, technology will eventually give ways to make most human
> abilities that are cheaper and more convenient than actually having a
> human around.  This will lead to lots of displaced people.

*Most* human abilities.  However, this will only create an increased
demand for the remaining human abilities:  reasoning, creativity, and
semantic symbol manipulation.  The computer was supposed to put hordes
of file clerks and bookkeepers out of work -- and it did, but it also
created even more jobs, for programmers, operators, service technicians,
computer salesmen, trouble-shooters, systems analysts, data-entry 
personnel, engineers, and those DJ's you hear while on hold to your
favorite software company's help line.

> Some people thought this would happen back when people believed that
> fortunes were to be made in the short term with robotics.  The robots
> were supposed to replace all the factory workers, leading to massive
> unemployment, and big fortunes for industrial robotics companies.  The
> lesson to learn from this is that the scarce resource was human
> dexterity, rather than the human hand.  The robots have good enough
> hands, but their clumsiness and inflexibility make humans a better buy
> in many cases.
> 
> When we get to the point where artificial dexterity is cheap and
> reliable, the massive unemployment scenario will happen.  We aren't
> there yet, but we will get there eventually.

When robots become dexterous enough to replace human hands, there will
be jobs not only for those who repair the robots, but for those who
design them, market them, sell them, respond to complaints about them,
program them, and maintain them (in cases where they can't maintain 
each other).  The people filling these jobs might be the people who
formerly did what the robots do, or they might not.  

Furthermore, this breakthrough is not going to hit all sectors of the
economy at once.  Most farm machinery was invented a century ago, but
there are still jobs for migrant farm workers.  Not all factories will
automate overnight.

> >What I see is technology has made it cheaper to live, whatever
> >level of technology you incorporate into your lifestyle.
> 
> Right.  But technology hasn't yet significantly reduced anybody's
> income by raising the level of competition, and I think it will
> eventually.
> Tim

Yes, the increase in the level of competition in the software 
industry has really cut into Bill Gates' income... NOT.

L. Neil Smith has written a wonderful essay called "Unanimous
Consent and the Utopian Vision (or, I Dreamed I Was A Signatory
In My Maidenform Bra)," in which he describes what happens when
technology takes the brakes off of economic development (government
taxes have something to do with holding the economy back, too..
maybe that's what the government is for?).  When technology gets
to boiling ("when it comes steam-engine time," in Charles Fort's 
phrase), the result is a labor shortage, not a surplus.  The
computer industry now has a negative unemployment rate, as jobs go
advertised and unfilled for months or years.  In Smith's memorable
words, "Every basket case who can blink once for yes and twice for
no will be needed as quality-control officers.  They'll be putting
chimps and gorillas on the payroll."

Suppose Joe Magnate fires all of the assembly-line personnel in his
widget factory and
installs robots.  Are those assembly-line workers taken out back
and shot?  No!  (In his mandatory book "Bionomics," Michael Rothschild
calls this the "Myth of the Firing Squad".)  They go out and find other
jobs -- in a different line of work, if necessary.  They retrain, if
they're smart.  They become widget salesmen or widget designers, or
they sell or design the plastic packaging that widgets come in.

The effect of technology is not to eliminate jobs, but to move the
available jobs to a higher skill level.  The real problem with
technological advance is the failure to invest in so-called "human
capital" -- the training of the work force.  Japanese corporations
guarantee employment for life; assembly-line workers displaced by
robots are re-trained by the company for other jobs -- often by
college-level education.  Some American companies are doing this
as well, but the crappy state of our publicly-funded schools are
turning out fewer and fewer graduates each year who even have the
literacy skills to make retraining possible.  This is not the 
fault of automation.

"Bionomics" is a book that everyone really should read.  Rothschild
persuasively presents the thesis that the economy is an ecosystem,
a spontaneous order arising from the simple organizing principle 
of mutualist economic relationships -- big auto makers buy speedometers
from little speedometer companies, 
just as we provide a haven for the bacteria in our
gut.  The difference between the two kinds of systems is the area of
competition.  Organisms in an ecosystem compete for resources (mostly,
food).  Companies in an economy compete for customers.  The examples
Rothschild draws from the fields of biology and paleontology are
fascinating, and his explanations of the results of this theory (the
success of Japan, the decline of America, and the failure of the
"War on Drugs"), and his prescriptions, are persuasive.
					dk

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