If John Tamny is right about robots:
Robots will ultimately be the biggest job creators simply because aggressive automation will free us up to do new work by virtue of it erasing toil that was once essential. Lest we forget, there was a time in American history when just about everyone worked whether they wanted to or not — on farms — just to survive. Thank goodness technology destroyed lots of agricultural work that freed Americans up to pursue a wide range of vocations off the farm.
With their evolution as labor inputs, robots bring the promise of new forms of work that will have us marveling at labor we wasted in the past, and that will make past job destroyers like wind, water, the cotton gin, the car, the internet and the computer seem small by comparison. All the previously mentioned advances made lots of work redundant, but far from forcing us into breadlines, the destruction of certain forms of work occurred alongside the creation of totally new ways to earn a living. Robots promise a beautiful multiple of the same.
To understand why, we need to first remember that what is saved on labor redounds to increased capital availability for new ideas. Jobs aren’t finite; rather they’re the result of investment. For every Google, Amazon or Apple Inc. there are tens of thousands of failed entrepreneurial attempts to be like one of the aforementioned giants (all three are major employers), but in order for entrepreneurs to make big experimental leaps, they must first have the capital to do so. The profit-enhancing efficiencies that robots personify (even to their most ardent critics) foretell a massive surge of investment that will gift us with all sorts of new companies and technological advances that promise the invention of new kinds of work previously unimagined.
it will certainly throw a lot of people’s dystopian view of the future into a cocked hat. His view is a bit rosier than mine but he’s making essentially the same argument I’ve made over the last decade. The reason I say “rosier” hinges on one key word in his statement above: “ultimately”. In the near term it may be a lot more dystopian than any of us would like. I do feel impelled to mention that the reason that people went to work in factories in the 19th and 20th centuries wasn’t because they were forced to, either literally or because they were starving on their farms, any more than the Chinese are today. It was because they were seeking a way of life better and more prosperous than they could attain through subsistence farming.
The thing about revolutions is that the consequences of a dramatic departure from the past simply can’t be predicted. James Watt or Isaiah Wedgwood didn’t know what the Industrial Revolution would bring, Jefferson and Adams didn’t know what would come about after the American Revolution, and John Vincent Atanasoff had no idea of what computers would be doing now. IMO the results of all of these revolutions have been benign.
The past may not be that good a predictor of future developments. It is, however, all that we have.
The profit-enhancing efficiencies that robots personify (even to their most ardent critics) foretell a massive surge of investment that will gift us with all sorts of new companies and technological advances that promise the invention of new kinds of work previously unimagined.
yeah, look at all the investment being done by the tens of billions in cash of the big players like Apple, Google & Microsoft! What? You tell me they’re hording their cash, only using it to buy out up and coming companies? Huh. Who’d a thunk it…..
One problem that he seems to skip is that the robots and the bots (software) are capable of doing more and more skilled labor. So they’re increasingly not just biting into the unskilled or semi-skilled workforce, but into the more skilled professions.
Which presents a problem because despite the largely prevailing nonsense that everybody is the same and that everyone would be as bright as Einstein if only we invested in more pre-K programs, people are limited by what they can do. So not everyone that picks fruit for a living is going to be capable of writing a boffo new algorithm that will make them millions. And with the coming surge of sex robots (who no doubt will all initially look like extremely large-eyed Japanese teenage girls), even that kind of human work is going to start evaporating. All that will be left will be pols, people paying pols off, and plumbers. And if they ever invent a plumbing robot, that’s just simply the end.
“And with the coming surge of sex robots (who no doubt will all initially look like extremely large-eyed Japanese teenage girls), even that kind of human work is going to start evaporating.”
“Surge,” eh? Well, anyway, I don’t know about you, but I shorted my Match.com and eharmony positions………..
The Japanese are working on all kinds of robots to do all kinds of low level service stuff, from nursing aid kind of work to helping people get around to, yes, sexbots. Although I wouldn’t be shocked if the S. Koreans beat them in that regard.
But I’m not talking about robots as mates, although there seems to be a segment of the market that would like that. So keep your eHarmony and Match.com stocks. I’m talking about old fashioned prostitution – the very bottom end of the labor market, the last resort of the utterly hopeless. The point being that even the most seemingly (and seamy) aspects of low-end labor are at risk. And at a guess, most prostitutes aren’t capable of running eBay or Yahoo, to pick a couple of examples.
So, what are THOSE folks supposed to do?
most seemingly (and seamy) _HUMAN_ types …
Screwed that up.
I agree. That ultimately word is key. I think the same thing is true of free trade. Ultimately it provides more growth. In the short term in can cause havoc.
Steve