We can all feel it: the pace of technological change is so intense now, that it sometimes feels like we’re falling behind, like there’s no way we can adapt quickly enough. What if the accelerating rate of technological progress is creating enemployment? I don’t mean just that people need to brush up on new skills, or that there is a temporary lag in adapting, I mean that whole orders of employment are disappearing, and we are entering an era of long term, intractable unemployment. Further, what if our institutions – governments, schools, businesses – are not adapting quickly enough to find opportunities for new types of employment? This is the turf Andrew McAfee and co-author Erik Brynjolfsson cover in their book, Race Against the Machine. Andrew is a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The problems – and the impact on human lives – are serious, but there is also hope for the future.
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Examples of McAffe's points in this NPR podcast- http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/10/1449784…
Let's bear in mind that the early promise of technology — what we were told back in the 1960s and 70s, when all this began ramping up, is that one of its fruits was going to be … leisure. The work week would shrink, machines would take over the drudge work, and our biggest problem would be to figure out what to do with all our free time.
I say bring it on, already — i have zero problem filling free time, and most of what i do on my own time is much more fulfilling than what i do at my job. So let's stop worrying about about full employment — what's really needed here is a new way to distribute the wealth generated by all this technology, without having to rely on an 18th-century industrial employment paradigm.
"The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed" (William Gibson, and many others)
If you look at the worlds richest people they are primarily from sectors where governments have granted monopolies: telecommunications (spectrum, right-of-way), software+media (copyright+patents).
Rather than the efficiencies of the machine offering benefits to all citizens, the benefits largely went to those who were the primary beneficiaries of these government granted monopolies.
Is this failure a social sciences one (IE: government policies on spectrum, copyright, etc), or one that relates to the "machine"?
Nora has already covered many stores about how we become more productive in collaborative volunteer ways when we have more unallocated/leisure/free/libre time. We may not be working for an employer, but often when we are volunteering we are being even more productive participants in society than we are when at our "jobs".
Note: I negotiated an 80% rather than the 100% time that my employer wanted, so that I would have that 20% to do volunteer work. As much as I like my current job, I find contribution to society is far more in the 20% than the 80%.
Side-note: There is quite a bit of talk of the copyright/patent monopolies and alternatives. For those who haven't thought about the impact of spectrum monopolies, I've found http://www.apc.org/en/pubs/issue/openaccess/spect… contains a good primer.
It was suggested we crowd source some thoughts. While I hope to read the book in the future to better understand the argument, I haven't done so. Please take the comments in that light..
I'd like to offer an alternative theory to the reduction of jobs that we've seen in recent decades. I'm not saying my theory is the only one, but that it is likely part of the puzzle.
In the late 1980's and early 1990's Western governments decided to outsource manufacturing jobs to majority-world countries (India, China, etc) in exchange for stronger government granted monopolies on usage of the ideas that were behind the processes and expressions (Copyright, Patent, Trademark, industrial design, etc). The theory was that the "smart" people in western societies would come up with all the good ideas, and that the "large number of people" in other societies would build it all for us. They wouldn't be able to build things on their own because of the government granted monopolies on the basic knowledge building blocks upon which everything was built.
Half of this deal happened: manufacturing jobs were deliberately exported by western governments.
Then large portions of the world started to question these government granted monopolies, wondering if reduced-friction information sharing — sometimes called peer production http://peerproduction.org — was a better way to organize the further development of knowledge. From the growth of Free Software which dominates the mobile, server and cloud spaces to Wikipedia, open access science and educational material, and so-on. In fact, more and more people believe that thinking of each other as nodes in a network able to collaborate better is a better way to grow the economy than having governments grant monopolies on knowledge.
For a growing part of society, including here in the west, these monopolies are seen as friction on the economy. They see government policy which grants stronger monopolies as job killers. I happen to believe that Bill C-11 is a job-killing bill, and will make Canada less competitive compared to the majority-world BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China, etc) countries that we are competing with for jobs. The same is true of job-killing bills like SOPA in the USA.
Is it the machines we are competing against, or each other where government policies by western governments are killing our competitiveness? Money is a measure of comparative wealth between people, and whatever "jobs" exist that we will want to pay each other for will be filled by humans. I guess I don't see this as a race against machines but against backward-facing government policies where those who are able to better harness the machines are getting competitive advantage to those whose governments are creating barriers.
Remember: everyone equally making more money is called inflation, and everyone equally making less money is deflation. It is when one human extracts more money than other humans that things are interesting.