Future State of Large-Scale Technological Unemployment

A Future State of Large-Scale Technological Unemployment is a state of large-scale technological unemployment that is a future societal state (with mass unemployment that is largely attributed to technological unemployment causes).

• Context:
  • It can (likely) be preceded by a State of Large-Scale Technological Underemployment.
  • It can range from being a Planned State of Mass Technological Unemployment to being an Unplanned State of Mass Technological Unemployment.
  • It can range from being a Techno-Optimist Prediction to being a Techno-Pessimist Prediction.
  • It can be succeeded by a Post-Labor Economy.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a State of Negligible Future Technological Unemployment.
  • a State of Full Employment.
  • a Utopian Society, conceived by a techno-optimist.
  • The Great Depression of the 1930s, where unemployment causes where not technological unemployment causes.
  • The Great Recession of 2007-2009, due to a financial crisis.
• See: Structural Unemployment, Capital-based Technological Change.

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References

2016

• Ryan Avent. (2016). “A world without work is coming – it could be utopia or it could be hell."
  • QUOTE: Robots will eventually do all our jobs, but we need to start planning to avert social collapse … The grappling has already begun, and the initial rounds of negotiation are more than a little discouraging.

2015

• (Vardi, 2015) ⇒ Moshe Y. Vardi. (2015). “Artificial Intelligence and Technological Unemployment." Tutorial at AAAI-2015.
• https://medium.com/backchannel/google-brains-co-inventor-tells-why-hes-building-chinese-neural-networks-662d03a8b548
  • QUOTE: Andrew Ng: The biggest problem that technology has posed for centuries is the challenge to labor. For example, there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US, whose jobs may be affected if we ever manage to develop self-driving cars. I think we need government and business leaders to have a serious conversation about that, and think the hype about “evil killer robots” is an unnecessary distraction.

2014

• (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014) ⇒ Erik Brynjolfsson, and Andrew McAfee. (2014). “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in the Time of Brilliant Technologies." W W Norton & Company. ISBN:0393239357

• (Smith & Anderson, 2014) ⇒ Aaron Smith, and Janna Anderson. (2014). “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs." Pew Research.
  • QUOTE: Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers — with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order. The other half of the experts who responded to this survey (52%) expect that technology will not displace more jobs than it creates by 2025.
• (Campa, 2014) ⇒ Riccardo Campa. (2014). “Technological Growth and Unemployment: A Global Scenario Analysis.” In: Journal of Evolution & Technology, 24(1).
  • QUOTE: … we will extrapolate from present data at least four different possible developments: 1) unplanned end of work scenario; 2) planned end of robots scenario; 3) unplanned end of robots scenario, and 4) planned end of work scenario.
• (y Arcas et al., 2014) ⇒ Blaise Agüera y Arcas. (2014). “Time to Ring Some Changes: Machine Intelligence, Economic Dignity, and Gender." Lecture at the Sixth Smoke Farm Symposium, July 26, 2014
  • QUOTE: … Tech means increasing capability at decreasing costs. It is hard from me to see a future in which, if we continue the way that we have, with the assumption that a basic standard of living requires that we be economically productive individually. That path seems that leads to the vast majority of us becoming, gods in the sense that we have these incredible capabilities, but broke, in the sense that we cannot put a roof over our heads. And, of course it leads to an increasing inequality in wealth between the people who build and control the systems that are doing the work, the technology, and everybody whose work is being eliminated by that technology becoming very good. So, I think that this is just an inevitability, and I think that the problem is not with technology but with Calvinism, and with this assumption that a standard of living and economic productivity should be tightly coupled. I think that we are reaching the end of the period where this makes sense. ...
• (Freeman, 2014) ⇒ Richard B. Freeman. (2014). “Who Owns the Robots Rules the World.” In: IZA World of Labor Journal, May.
  • QUOTE: Employment, however, is just one side of the labor market calculus. What happens to wages is also important to well-being. If robots take the good jobs at high pay and humans get the low-pay leftovers, the living standards of persons dependent on labor income will fall. In such a scenario, Luddite fears would appear more realistic than assurances that comparative advantage guarantees work for all in a well-functioning economy.

    But economics has a response to this danger. Herbert Simon’s 1965 analysis of technological change showed that, in a well-functioning market economy, labor gains from labor-saving and capital-saving technologies — as long as the labor supply curve is less elastic than the capital supply curve [6]. In a full-employment economy, any technological advance raises the pay for the input, with inelastic supply relative to the input with elastic supply. By treating capital as elastic and labor as inelastic, Simon essentially put Malthus upside down.

    The historical facts fit Simon’s model.

    On the price side, the real return to capital has been roughly constant in the long run, which implies an infinitely elastic supply curve, while real wages have trended upward. On the quantity side, the stock of physical capital and the stock of knowledge capital have increased massively relative to labor. The world population has grown but birth rates have plummeted as societies have become richer, suggesting that population growth will continue to fall far short of the growth of knowledge and capital. But Simon treated labor as homogeneous, and ignored the distribution of ownership of robots and related machines that is central to analyzing the impact of robots / mechanization on society.

• (Dvorsky, 2014) ⇒ George Dvorsky. (2014). “How Universal Basic Income Will Save Us From the Robot Uprising, Io9."

2013

• (Ford, 2013) ⇒ Martin Ford. (2013). “Could Artificial Intelligence Create An Unemployment Crisis?.” In: Communications of the ACM Journal, 56(7). doi:10.1145/2483852.2483865
  • QUOTE: It is important to realize technology does not have to cause immediate job destruction in order to create significant future unemployment. The U.S. economy needs to generate in excess of 100,000 new jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. As a result, anything that significantly slows the rate of ongoing job creation could have a significant impact over the long term. Because workers are also consumers, entrenched technological unemployment would be very likely to depress consumer spending and confidence — thereby spawning a wave of secondary job losses that would affect even occupations not directly susceptible to automation.4

    I suspect the impact of accelerating technology on the job market may ultimately represent a dramatic and vastly under-acknowledged challenge for both our economy and society. Many extremely difficult issues would arise, including finding ways for people to occupy their time and remain productive in a world where work was becoming less available and less essential. The biggest immediate challenge, however, would be one of income distribution: how will people without jobs and incomes support themselves, and how will they be able to participate in the market and help drive the broad-based consumer demand that it vital to sustained economic prosperity and innovation?

    Finally, it is worth noting everything I have suggested here might be thought of as the "weak case" for technological disruption of the job market. I have presumed only that narrow, specialized forms of machine intelligence will increasing eliminate more routine jobs. None of these technologies would be generally intelligent or could pass a Turing test. Yet, the more speculative possibility of strong AI cannot be completely discounted. If, someday, machines can match or even exceed the ability of a human being to think and to conceive new ideas — while at the same time enjoying all the advantages of a computer in areas like computational speed and data access — then it becomes somewhat difficult to imagine just what jobs might be left for even the most capable human workers.

• (Economist, 2013) ⇒ The Economist. (2013). “Real robot talk.” In: The Economist, Labour Markets, Mar 1st 2013.
  • QUOTE: If society wishes to avoid such an outcome, the only real option is redistribution and a lot of it. …

    The point is that “technological unemployment” may become an effective reality given lagging wages for less-skilled workers, sufficient to eliminate the incentive to find a job and given reasonable (though not particularly attractive) alternatives. It's not a certainty that things will develop this way. But it's a realistic enough possibility that societies should begin thinking significantly about how to reform and improve their welfare states : to substantially upgrade education, to provide for the best possible work incentives, and to secure finances for the foreseeable future.

    Technological progress sufficient to cause these kinds of dislocations should also generate overall economic gains large enough to make everyone better off. But just because everyone could be made better off by progress doesn't mean that everyone will be made better off. There must be an institutional framework in place to ensure that the gains from growth are shared.

• (Drum, 2013) ⇒ Kevin Drum. (2013). “Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?.” In: Mother Jones, May 13, 2013.
  • QUOTE: It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that — slowly, haltingly — it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it. …

    … When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down.

• (The Economist, 2013-08-25) ⇒ Labour Markets. (2013-08-25). “On 'bullshit jobs'.” In: The Economist.
  • QUOTE: … there is a decent chance that "bullshit" administrative jobs are merely a halfway house between "bullshit" industrial jobs and no jobs at all. Not because of the conniving of rich interests, but because machines inevitably outmatch humans at handling bullshit without complaining.

• (Frey & Osborne, 2013) ⇒ Carl Benedikt Frey, and Michael A Osborne. (2013). “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?." Technical Report, Oxford University - OMS.

2011

• (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011) ⇒ Erik Brynjolfsson, and Andrew McAfee. (2011-10-17). “Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy." Digital Frontier Press. Kindle Edition.
• (Economist - Babbage, 2011-11-04) ⇒ The Economist. (2011). “Difference Engine: Luddite legacy.” In: The Economist, Nov 4th 2011.

2009

• (Ford, 2009) ⇒ Martin Ford. (2009). “The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future." CreateSpace. ISBN:1448659817

1995

• (Rifkin, 1995) ⇒ Jeremy Rifkin. (1995). “The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era.” In: Putnam Publishing Group. ISBN:0-87477-779-8.

1994

• (Freeman & Soete, 1994) ⇒ Chris Freeman, and Luc Soete. (1994). “Work for all Or Mass Unemployment?: Computerised Technical Change Into the Twenty-first Century." Pinter. ISBN:1855672553

1965

• (Simon, 1965) ⇒ Herbert A. Simon. (1965). “The Shape of Automation for Men and Management." Harper and Row.

1949

• (Wiener, 1949) ⇒ Norbert Wiener. (1949). “Letter to UAW President Walter Reuther.” In: August 13, 1949 Journal.
  • QUOTE: … This apparatus is extremely flexible, and susceptible to mass production, and will undoubtedly lead to the factory without employees; as for example, the automatic automobile assembly line. In the hands of the present industrial set-up, the unemployment produced by such plants can only be disastrous. …

1930

• (Keynes, 1930) ⇒ John Maynard Keynes. (1930). “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930).” In: Essays in persuasion.
  • QUOTE: The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption.

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