Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Kaspar Hauser]

Personally, I think the first step that any progressive politician has to take is to repeatedly say in the most mythically resonant language possible that the working class has been devastated by trade deals and automation and that they should be angry as hell. Then I think they need to talk seriously about a guaranteed basic income and heavily taxing industries that replace humans with robots--not to stop automation, but rather to share its benefits through such a guarantee of income security. Automation is hitting us like a pile driver and it's only going to get exponentially worse. If we mirror the rage of the working class while offering policies that give real cause for hope we will be able to sway a lot of Trump supporters. Continuing on as we have been won't work: you can't fact check your way out of fascism, you can't scold or ridicule your way out of fascism, and you can't fear monger your way out of fascism. Most of all, you can't expect checks and balances to be an impregnable bulwark, and you can't expect the chaos and ignorance of fascist administrations to be their undoing.

[Lawnmower Boy]

 Automation is hitting us like a pile driver and it's only going to get exponentially worse. I

No. It's. Not. Automation is when we replace workers with machines. It is directly reflected in the change in worker productivity. Worker productivity increase rates have been in free fall since 1973, getting worse to the point of actually being negative for much of the last year. We aren't automating. We're de-automating. And not in a good way, either. 

 

Annual increase in productivity ran at 2.8%/year in 1947--73, and has never risen to that level since. 

 

It was particularly flat in 1973--1990, but has fallen even further since 2007, per the explainer linked above. A more fine grained cut of the numbers at Business Insider proposes that the period of improvement was 1994--2003. Every narrowing of the numbers cut has seen the numbers look worse: Since 2011, American labour productivity growth has been at 0.5%, less than a fifth of the postwar boom period. It went negative in the first two quarters of 2016, although it looks like it recovered in the last half of the year to give an annual 1.0% rate.

 

Across more than seventy years of data (we can go back to the 1880s, if necessary), productivity growth is infallibly linked to a tight labour market. Let unemployment rise, and productivity growth falls. Which makes sense, actually. 

 

Now some points:

 

i) "Automation," or capital deepening, is an old, old phenomena. We've been worrying about being replaced by robots since the Nineteenth Century --throw in "labour saving innovations," and the argument goes back to the Eighteenth Century, and perhaps earlier. Investing at the front end of a process makes sense under only one condition: you do not anticipate innovation forcing you to change your production practices before you've paid for your investment. Innovation is not the same thing as automation!!1! Innovation typically leads to an increasing labour share.

ii) Talk about how automation is about to take our jobs has always had a fairly obvious purpose: it discourages people from seeking wage increases.

iii) Nowadays, it has an even more obvious purpose: it supports the ridiculous stock market over-valuations of assorted Silicon Valley "unicorns."

 

We do not need robots paying taxes (although that's what the corporate income tax is). We do not need a universal basic income. We need a tight labour market.  

[megaplayboy]

There's a difference between a machine that can make widgets and one that can draft legal briefs. Just saying.

[Ranxerox]

Yes, the one one that makes widgets is actually useful.  

 

 

 

 

Sorry. I know you are a lawyer.  I still couldn't resist the lawyer joke.

[Old Man]

Yes, the current fear of automation assumes that the nature of jobs remains static over time, which it does not. The economy and the workers are not suffering because the blacksmiths and the cotton pickers went extinct.

[megaplayboy]

Yes, the current fear of automation assumes that the nature of jobs remains static over time, which it does not. The economy and the workers are not suffering because the blacksmiths and the cotton pickers went extinct.

You can design robots to perform almost any form of manual labor better than a human can do it. We are on the verge of robots and computers which can replace knowledge workers. That's qualitatively different from rendering blacksmiths and cotton pickers obsolete.

[megaplayboy]

I guess my question is, isn't the assumption, that new jobs that can't be replicated by automation will arise in sufficient numbers to replace those which are replaced by automation, at least potentially a faulty assumption?

[Kaspar Hauser]

I guess my question is, isn't the assumption, that new jobs that can't be replicated by automation will arise in sufficient numbers to replace those which are replaced by automation, at least potentially a faulty assumption?

There also seems to be an assumption that the new jobs will pay as well and have as much security as the ones being lost. I certainly haven't seen that happening.

[TheDarkness]

They're always hiring at the soylent green plant.

[Pariah]

As long as the machines need someone to program them, there's at least that option.

 

When we start having machines programming machines...well, let's just hope they'll still follow Asimov's three laws.

[Lord Liaden]

It's hard to anticipate the changes technology will bring to society in the future. Our modern Western civilization is pursuing technological innovation and refinement as though those were both inevitable and inherently good, rarely even attempting to anticipate what they'll do to our society and even mentality. We're conducting a massive experiment on our descendants with no clear purpose or desired outcome.

 

Riding a runaway train downhill, by the time you see a wall on the tracks it's usually too late to hit the brakes.

[womble]

As long as the machines need someone to program them, there's at least that option.

 

When we start having machines programming machines...well, let's just hope they'll still follow Asimov's three laws.

Hopefully someone will come up with something a bit better than those. Given that every book involving them is in some way about how they are inherently flawed.

 

Personally I find the "technology won't make humans redundant in large numbers" assertion to be complacent. Sure, buggy-whip makers went under with the advent of the automobile, and had a (very, very niche) revival with the advent of socially-permissible BDSM, but the technology of automation is already having a large effect on the kind and quality of job available and those effects are only going to be magnified as technology becomes more capable. The other "worker" that became very much less employable at the advent of the car was the horse. What's coming has the potential to do the same to people-as-workers.

[Lawnmower Boy]

You can design robots to perform almost any form of manual labor better than a human can do it. We are on the verge of robots and computers which can replace knowledge workers. That's qualitatively different from rendering blacksmiths and cotton pickers obsolete.

The idea that "automation" is just now starting to bite knowledge workers is --

 

You know what, never mind. Google wants to be (the imaginary) Bell Labs, not the company that stole all the advertising, and they've got more money than me, so I guess we'll just have to agree to live in their world.. . I don't want to go to work, I just want to lie in this warm bed and live in my Google dreams of eternal innovation forever! To the stars!

 

Stupid real world is so cold and awful....

 

The first time "knowledge workers" were automated? I don't know. There's a cave in South Africa that was maybe the first place where human beings drew symbolic images as memory aids, some seventy thousand years ago. There's certainly a great pile of clay tablets marked with a primitive cuneiform script under the Inanna of Uruk, supplementing and replacing the old way of putting figurines in envelopes.

 

Soon, administrators, accountants and, yes, lawyers, will be able to write things down, instead of standing in great talking circles all day arguing about what had been said at the last one and pounding out a consensus. Move ahead five thousand years, and the typewriter replaces the handsome free-hand of the old partner. Never again will people puzzle over whether it's an "f" or an "s," and no longer will law students sit at the desk, practicing their swooping curves and descanting loops.

 

There's still shorthand, of course. How else to extract the meat of a decision laid down long ago, buried in statute books available only at the library? Of course it was opposing counsel that just ripped the page out instead of bothering with summarising it --Oh, wait, what's that odd, actinic flash of light from across the library?

 

The reason that didn't happen is pretty clear. The photocopier revolution wasn't to kill lawyering jobs because it came in a booming economy. Firms hired legal assistant, and things went on as before. I'm no lawyer, but I suspect that the main result of having all of this research material on hand was to produce longer and more intricate briefs.That would require more lawyers to do all of the document review and other work.  After all, law is an agonistic process. Your brief, long, or short, is only as good as opposing counsel's.

 

What lawyers are complaining about right now is that these  junior lawyers aren't advancing to partner status, as they shepherd their new and more powerful briefs through the courts. What happened to the agonistic process?  Having launched a rhetorical question in the air, I'll provide a rhetorical answer: the recession happened. The prospective returns from a court victory obtained by more lawyering fell below the costs of obtaining that victory, and the legal industry entered into a completely private, implicit, a-wink-is-as-good-as-a-nod disarmament agreement. And if there is a violation at the margins, if lowly doc reviewers find themselves pressed to do just a bit more, work that you might expect a junior partner to do, why, just remind them that, in the near future, Google will probably come up with an app that can "write" a legal brief.    

[megaplayboy]

Sigh. Document review--which I do--is looking at a significant reduction in personnel requirements, as predictive coding and technology assisted review get steadily better. This does NOT mean that new jobs will open up for those superfluous reviewers. It's possible, on the margins, that automation may enhance the capability of small firms and solo practitioners, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the legal job market will shift to accommodate the displaced knowledge workers. Ditto for a dozen other knowledge worker fields. This IS different from other historical incidences of automation. This wave is studying and replicating the most sophisticated analytical and cognitive processes into algorithms to be replicated and emulated by software. It's not the printing press or word processing. It's legal analysis and argument,neuro surgery, engineering design, stock trading, everything humans do that can be broken down into steps and processes. It's not intuitively obvious that the job displacement problem will take care of itself. Now, short term, I agree with you that a tight labor market is necessary to increase wages. But longer term, over the next 20-40 years, automation of labor is a serious problem that needs to be taken seriously.

[Old Man]

It's hard to anticipate the changes technology will bring to society in the future. Our modern Western civilization is pursuing technological innovation and refinement as though those were both inevitable and inherently good, rarely even attempting to anticipate what they'll do to our society and even mentality. We're conducting a massive experiment on our descendants with no clear purpose or desired outcome.

 

Riding a runaway train downhill, by the time you see a wall on the tracks it's usually too late to hit the brakes.

 

Experiment or not, science and technology are the only things that have ever improved the human condition, and it can't happen too quickly.  Yes, things will be different for our descendants, and that's good.

[assault]

The fundamental question about automation is: who owns the machines?

 

That is, in whose interests are they being used?

 

Are they being used for the good of society as a whole, or for the benefit of a few? Are these two options counterposed? What are the ramifications of the answers to these questions?

[Lord Liaden]

Experiment or not, science and technology are the only things that have ever improved the human condition, and it can't happen too quickly.  Yes, things will be different for our descendants, and that's good.

 

I must respectfully disagree with you in part. The only thing that ever improved the human condition, is compassion for the condition of our fellow humans leading to attempts to improve it. Science motivated by compassion has led to great advances in education, medicine, nutrition, and more. Science motivated by our baser impulses has led to environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, rampant global warming, and more. There's no inherent ethical dimension to technology, and no guarantee that the benefits of technology will trickle down to the disenfranchised. In much of the world we see the opposite happening.

[Clonus]

Yes, the current fear of automation assumes that the nature of jobs remains static over time, which it does not. The economy and the workers are not suffering because the blacksmiths and the cotton pickers went extinct.

 

Isn't that naive extrapolation?   It doesn't matter if the nature of jobs changes, if people can't change to fill the new jobs any better than machines can.  Machines improve.  People don't. 

[Old Man]

I must respectfully disagree with you in part. The only thing that ever improved the human condition, is compassion for the condition of our fellow humans leading to attempts to improve it. Science motivated by compassion has led to great advances in education, medicine, nutrition, and more. Science motivated by our baser impulses has led to environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, rampant global warming, and more. There's no inherent ethical dimension to technology, and no guarantee that the benefits of technology will trickle down to the disenfranchised. In much of the world we see the opposite happening.

 

We can agree to disagree, of course.  But the reality is that most technological advancement has been driven not by compassion, nor hatred, but the simple selfish desire to improve the lives of the inventor and her family.  The contagion of knowledge does the rest.  Yes, some technology is harmful, but it's clear that on balance technology improves quality of life, as there is no serious movement toward giving it up and going back to thirty year lifespans foraging in the mud with rotten teeth.  And while the distribution of technology is certainly uneven, it clearly does reach most people eventually.  To the degree that compassion has accomplished anything at any scale, it has only done so through the application of technology anyway.

[Kaspar Hauser]

This article, written by a Bosnian who survived the horrors of the 90s, pulled something together for me. Like all authoritarians who come to power, Trump and his regime are engaging in a form of psychological warfare designed to arouse our sadism, and it's working really well. It's what the Alt Right does everywhere, because it's only when our sadism is unleashed that we're willing to let them tear down every institution that keeps us safe.

 

http://lithub.com/aleksandar-hemon-on-the-urge-to-violence-in-a-time-of-trump/

[Old Man]

Isn't that naive extrapolation?   It doesn't matter if the nature of jobs changes, if people can't change to fill the new jobs any better than machines can.  Machines improve.  People don't. 

 

I flatly reject the idea that people don't, or can't, improve.  Changes to our half-assed educational system alone could radically improve the next generation of humans, and there's no reason they couldn't be improved directly through engineering or augmentation.  At some point in the distant future, sure, humans will be rendered obsolete by some combination of AIs and engineered humans, but that's probably going to have to happen regardless if we want intelligent Terran life to survive and spread in the very long term.

[Pattern Ghost]

 going back to thirty year lifespans foraging in the mud with rotten teeth.

 

 

<pedant>

Those 30 year lifespans are skewed by extremely high infant mortality.

</pedant>

[megaplayboy]

I flatly reject the idea that people don't, or can't, improve.  Changes to our half-assed educational system alone could radically improve the next generation of humans, and there's no reason they couldn't be improved directly through engineering or augmentation.  At some point in the distant future, sure, humans will be rendered obsolete by some combination of AIs and engineered humans, but that's probably going to have to happen regardless if we want intelligent Terran life to survive and spread in the very long term.

Let me put it this way. At the outset of the use of fossil fuels for manufacturing and electricity generation and powering automobiles, had we known at the time all the adverse effects of pollution from burning fossil fuels, at least some people would have invested time and thought and resources into mitigating the adverse side-effects and looking for less-problematic alternatives. Replacing up to 50% of existing jobs with automation in the next 40 years will be MASSIVELY DISRUPTIVE. We should plan ahead for that, shouldn't we?

[Clonus]

I flatly reject the idea that people don't, or can't, improve.  Changes to our half-assed educational system alone could radically improve the next generation of humans, and there's no reason they couldn't be improved directly through engineering or augmentation. 

 

They couldn't be improved to be better than the technology used to rebuild them.  And they would always have one critical disadvantage.  They're people.  They need to be paid.  They have rights they'll want respected.  Therefore it would always be better to replace a human with a machine that can do the same job even if it can't do it quite as well.

[TheDarkness]

I must respectfully disagree with you in part. The only thing that ever improved the human condition, is compassion for the condition of our fellow humans leading to attempts to improve it. Science motivated by compassion has led to great advances in education, medicine, nutrition, and more. Science motivated by our baser impulses has led to environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, rampant global warming, and more. There's no inherent ethical dimension to technology, and no guarantee that the benefits of technology will trickle down to the disenfranchised. In much of the world we see the opposite happening.

Ethics itself, as far as codified ethics, is itself a technology that became more able to deal with nuance over time, as far as it has been conveyed in different societies. Of course, we could argue that in the West, we are two millenium away from times when there were actually people who attempted to live by a codified ethical system, and in both the West and the East, such systems became loaded down with political and cultural baggage that tended to reduce their effectiveness.

 

Further, the ability of societies to project the ethical conundrums of new technologies into the future has often been the impetus and/or justification for a number of heinous things. The science of genetics, applied to making life better, turned monstrous very quickly not because of the technology, but because of the flawed ethical judgments on defining what would be best for mankind.

 

When ethics has not, in large part, experienced the same development, in a purely practical sense(as ethics, not as a way to hold together societies, or underpinning for other movements, solely as practical ethics), as other technologies, it will always lag.

 

Unfortunately, ethics as a topic(but not as a practice) has uses for politicians, people who love their authority at any level(whether parent or teacher or leader or boss makes little difference), and so it gets subverted and loaded with things that are not themselves related, and becomes something one displays oneself on shorthand versus actually practicing with an emphasis on all the meanings of the word practice.

 

Regardless, it's probably unwise to be the second person in a sometimes unfriendly neighborhood to figure out how to make tempered steel.