What If This Is No Accident? What If This Is The Future?
19th November 2011
Ford essentially argues that we have hit an inflection point at which technology destroys jobs faster than it creates them. Kling writes (at length, but it’s worth reading): “The new jobs that emerge may not produce a middle class … gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements [may] accrue to an economic elite … we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services.”
To what extent are our existing social frameworks dependent on structural friction? The whole distinction between a republic and a democracy is based on the thought that the latter is impractical — we can’t all vote on every question that comes up, so we elect representatives who do these silly thing so we don’t have to. With information flow becoming more and more frictionless, does that assumption still apply? Applied to employment, this becomes the now-getting-old notion of ‘disintermediation’ — in times past you needed middlemen to handle distribution, and customers are becoming more and more able to connect directly with suppliers. And ‘middle management’ in companies has been dissolving for decades, ‘flattening hierarchies’ being a corporate buzz-phrase for almost as long.
The takeaway thought seems to be that if you have a job that can be automated — and look around at the jobs that people thought could never be automated that (surprise!) actually have been once we have the breakthrough technology — you’re in trouble and had better be prepared to jump from the roof of the train before the tunnel mouth gets here. Just sayin’.
November 21st, 2011 at 07:31
So we will return to the era of ‘bread and circuses’, pioneered by the Romans and proving remarkably stable–with the exception of the occaisional bloody Nika Riot–for some 800 years.
Sometimes the old ways are best.
November 21st, 2011 at 08:08
Or like modern Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, Argentina, Brazil… not to mention most of Africa. Some ways aren’t so old, after all.
November 21st, 2011 at 09:01
I might point out that this is only a problem in the so-called ‘First World’.
Out in the rest of the world they can’t afford automation so life goes on as usual.
November 21st, 2011 at 13:52
As you so tediously keep pointing out, we don’t live in the rest of the world, so (by your logic) what applies to them is of no significance to us.
November 21st, 2011 at 14:39
Ah, but those residents of Outremer may make it our business. It won’t involve our living there, but rather them coming here.
I foresee a real ‘class’ war–not the chimera currently being conjured up by the Republicans to induce fear in the credulous, but one involving real bullets and real blood. Resource wars, to be specific, with possible 5th Columns of the Underclass here who have been ‘superfluated’ (to coin a phrase).
But it’s okay; go back to sleep. I promise to wake you when the revolution happens.
November 21st, 2011 at 17:46
Unless the residents of Outremer have nukes, they can be ignored. Those that do don’t have effective delivery vehicles, so they can be ignored as well.