Reddit reviews The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

You wouldn't happen to have read this book? https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482767189&sr=8-1&keywords=second+machine+age

They talk about exactly that, capital vs. labor and the effects it's having on society that all wealth gain is going to capital. They also talk about median wages being stagnant since 1979 and falling since 1999. Pretty interesting. It also makes a lot of sense, every time a robot replaces a worker then the value that the robot creates doesn't go to the worker's family but rather to the owner of the robot. That's a huge driving factor behind the wealth inequality we see today and there's more to come. All the wealth generated in transportation will go to Uber instead of being spread across many companies and independent contractors. We'll see that pattern again and again...

Your basic argument seems to be a shift in capital from a scarce resource (e.g., money) to a post-scare resource (e.g., Von Neumann machines). I have a hard time believing that the people currently in control of the vast majority of our current capital will allow this to happen in any calm and reasonable way. Here's basically how I see this playing out in the US:

1. Robots will start taking over a lot of jobs. Like 60% of them in the next 20-30 years.^1
   
2. Politicians (and the wealthy) will continue their rhetoric of "hard work instead of handouts".
   
3. There will be no jobs to replace the lost jobs.^2
   
4. We'll hit something like 50%-60% unemployment, with (more) people starving in the streets.
   
5. The riots will start, tending toward revolution.
   
6. If we're really, really lucky, we'll get universal basic income in place before the US has its own, personal Bastille day.
   
7. After revolution, we will be on UBI and tending toward post-scarcity.
   
   It's that middle bit, stages 4-6, that I'm worried about. I'm excited for stage 7, but I don't see how we're going to get there without a big fucking mess. Here are some other people who agree with me that, unless we do some things now that the hyper-rich don't seem into, we're going to have a lot of "fun" with stages 4-6:
   
   

• Two economists from MIT
  
• A hyper-rich US plutocrat
  
• This Wired article
  
• Every news outlet from The Guardian to Mother Jones.
  
  And the problem is that the hyper-rich are controlling US leadership, and, again, it is against their personal (short-term) interest to prevent this problem. Seriously, watch that TED talk.
  
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  Footnotes:
  
  

1. Current reports estimate 38% in 15 years
   
2. There are some arguments to be made against this, but I don't buy them. There is a lot of evidence that this is going to happen, and within our lifetimes.

I remember a stat in the (fantastic) book The Second Machine Age that showed similar levels of automation in factories in China as the US, so it's really something that goes well beyond the cost of labor.

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Good article, thanks for sharing

> It’s different this time.

It bugs me when people cite earlier technologies disrupting the labor market saying that the scale of automation we're faced with isn't going to be a problem. We're making machines that can think now (edit: made exaggeration, but machines are getting smarter at a much faster pace) , it's completely different now.

Also, I recommend this book.

Well, then, we're screwed. Reasonable duplication is already here, it's just a matter of cost right now. We are already in the Second Machine Age.

Since you're enlightened on this subject, I wonder if you've read this book? If so, what are your thoughts on it? Its part of what got me thinking about the subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649

>Except, empirically, it shows otherwise.

Actually, minimum wages have been shown to cause job losses: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/economy/seattle-minimum-wage.html

The Berkeley study covered restaurant workers only. A different University of Washington study compiled data from all sectors in Seattle, and showed far worse results:

The University of Washington researchers found that the minimum-wage increase resulted in higher wages, but also a significant reduction in the working hours of low-wage earners. This was especially true of the more recent minimum-wage increase, from as high as $11 an hour to up to $13 an hour in 2016. In that case, wages rose about 3 percent, but the number of hours worked by those in low-wage jobs dropped about 9 percent — a sizable amount that led to a net loss of earnings on average.

Yeah surely the rents don't help, but if you make the minimum wage $100/hour, you will have fewer jobs. This is econ 101 stuff.

As for the automation replacing jobs thing, the experts on AI/robotics are mostly in agreement on this. Check out:

The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and one of the most cited scholars in information systems and economics, and Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT,

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, by Martin Ford.

High-Skilled White Collar Work? Machines Can Do That Too NY Times article

It's not really a question of when, it's already happening.

Consider how:

Turbotax and automated payroll systems have replaced a significant % of accounting positions

Wall St firms need fewer employees because most trading is now automated

Highly automated Amazon warehouses means fewer employees are needed for retail and malls shut down

Law firms now need fewer new associates and paralegals due to legal software

Universities can hire fewer teaching assistants due to educational software

In the ports of NYC and worldwide a few engineers controlling robotic cranes have replaced tens of thousands of longshoreman unloading and loading ships

Many newer behemoth companies like Facebook and Google are worth far more than old guard firms like GM or Walmart but require only a few hundred to a few tens of thousands of human employees...

And technological progress isn't slowing down, it is speeding up. Think of the approximately 20 million drivers who will be almost surely out of a job within the next 2 decades as self driving cars and trucks hit the roads.

Yes there will still be jobs, but a surprising number of them are being and will continue to be automated, at an ever increasing rate. One cashier watching 10 self-checkout scanners replacing ten cashiers is a good example of the jobs that might still require humans... until you replace her too with a robot.

Neither tariffs nor high minimum wages will change this trend. UBI is really the only long term solution.

The one that's making the rounds at work is The Second Machine Age. I haven't read it yet but that might be more up your alley

Probably this: https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649

Ah yes you’re right David Autor is the chap. Fascinating work! This is what I call structural technological unemployment, though it would be more accurate to call it UNDER-employment. Of course, if these trends continue in the same direction or amplify because of technology in different ways, things could go very badly.

This is why adaptation to Human-Centered Capitalism is so important

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.29.3.3

These papers are starting to get rather old to me at least! Here’s also The Race by Man and Machine, by Acemoglu and Restrepo

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/aer.20160696

These two are experts in the technological impacts on economies. Check out The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. I’d bet you could find some good papers by them if you search for it:

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649/ref=nodl_

Another good one about post-scarcity economics might be Abundance by Peter Diamandis. He’s not an economist but check out all those boards he’s on!! Guy knows his stuff

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance:_The_Future_Is_Better_Than_You_Think

Really was trying to find a good paper for you by Young Joon Kim, Kyungsoo Kim, and Su Kyoung Lee in 2017... shucks. Published in the journal Futures. In any case you can find a good related article here: http://earchive.tpu.ru/bitstream/11683/52262/1/jess-62-288.pdf

This last one was very much a clincher study, so enjoy! Behold: Technological innovation and employment in derived labour demand models: A hierarchical meta-regression analysis
Mehmet Ugur, Sefa Awaworyi Churchill and Edna Solomon! So much glorious MATH

https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/16035/1/16035_Ugur_Technological%20innovation%20and%20employment%20%28AAM%29%202016.pdf

Hope you don’t mind if I turn in for the night I’ll chat later if you’re up for it

Read this

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649