I believe its dangerous to assume that the jobs we're losing as our technological abilities advance will continue to be replaced by new ones. Keep in mind, we're not just talking about losing manufacturing jobs (which is all the author seems to focus on here). We're also talking about losing human resources departments, which previously had to track all the other human employees in the company, and managers, who had to manage the underlings and the human resource department.
Robots aren't going to stay confined to manufacturing plants. CAT is heavily invested in robotic trucks. One of the coolest videos that I've seen that's been posted to this site showed a robotic fulfillment center. There was one just today (admittedly, kind of silly) about a robotic garbage man. This is only going to continue.
Then there are the jobs that aren't necessarily disappearing, but that aren't growing, either. Software is letting accounting and finance departments ramp up their productivity per worker. A company can these days grow in complexity and revenues but only needs to staff at replacement levels to keep up with the increased work load. And, as it becomes more and more obvious that there are very real benefits to offloading to service providers rather than maintaining your own data centers, ops teams, and IT departments, companies will.
This isn't surprising. This whole community is formed around the idea that these days, starting a viable business is completely in the power of small teams of smart people. We've talked about the real jobs that are coming along with these companies as they become established, but I would bet that they're running at a level of productivity that shames companies of their size from just 10 years ago.
It's a real question: where are the new jobs coming from? For the next few years, we'll have a nice little bubble in the healthcare industry as the Baby Boomer wave crests, but that's hardly sustainable.
I think the real question is, how are we going to restructure to deal with high levels of unemployment, so that we stay stable and productive? How do we incentivize the smart and capable to keep pushing us forward without completely dropping everyone else?
"I think the real question is, how are we going to restructure to deal with high levels of unemployment, so that we stay stable and productive? ..."
The real issue - social issue at least, is how will the people support themselves. As more an more jobs are automated away, it becomes unfeasible for everyone to rely on a paycheck to feed themselves. I am not seeing a Welfare State heavily taxing profits to provide for an increasingly unemployed population. There will be plenty of suffering from the ones whose services are not needed anymore.
For this reason, it is increasingly important for common people to own their means of production. The only job you cannot be laid off is the self employed one. This is more and more an strategic issue for the household economy to have at least one bread winner working on their own venture.
Seems like this century will be very entrepreneurial, or won't be at all,
You're right, I should have been more clear. "High levels of unemployment" isn't right; I should have said something like "increasingly rapid dissolution of the current employment model". I certainly didn't mean to imply I thought the answer was a "Welfare State", though I'm probably not as opposed to the idea of socialism as you seem to be.
Dramatically increased entrepreneurialism certainly counts as restructuring.
Hey, a mild form of socialism is great in many ways.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the rights to "Life, Freedom and Pursue of Happiness". In particular, I don't think the founders meant the right to Life to mean "right to not being killed by direct unjustified violent action". If you have the right to Life, you should have the right to the means to stay alive and healthy.
My critic to the Welfare State idea is not that we should not care for our own people. It has more to do with keeping the citizenship disempowered. If you cannot provide yourself with basic needs by your own means and work, because the barriers of entry are so high... then the only option left is to have someone bail you out of the mess.
As techies, I feel we are very vulnerable. Think Spolsky's Development Abstraction Layer (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...). We can fall in a comfort zone by being productive within a larger organization that extracts economic benefits from our creations... but once we become severed from that infrastructure, many of us become helpless.
The reality is that you can never know where the new jobs come from. But any growing (either in the sense of population or productive output) society will need more work done.
Consider the factory robots from the article: they automate a bunch of people out of a job and just a few people now do what 100 did before. But now the machine shops that make the parts to build that automation have more work to do, they need to buy more CNC machine tools to keep up and (a few) more people to run them. So the CNC tool supplier sells more machinery and now needs more sales reps, field installers & repair personnel. The company importing the CNC machines from Japan hires more people to handle increased demand, etc.
You have to look at the entire value chain of a process to see the ripple effects and even then it's only visible in hindsight.
Existing factories that aren't yet automated and employ all 100 workers already depend on upstream providers. They already need parts and processes, they already need the tools the human workers use, they're already courted by sales people. Not to mention, they depend on uniform services, on-site nurses, healthcare providers, maybe cafeteria workers. Because their spaces have to accomodate humans, their factories have to have certain sized doors, passages, have to meet a bunch of safety standards. They have to lease land for parking lots, hire security guards to make sure cars aren't getting broken into, etc.
I think its kind of naive to just point to a shifting supply chain as if that addresses the problem.
Robots aren't going to stay confined to manufacturing plants. CAT is heavily invested in robotic trucks. One of the coolest videos that I've seen that's been posted to this site showed a robotic fulfillment center. There was one just today (admittedly, kind of silly) about a robotic garbage man. This is only going to continue.
Then there are the jobs that aren't necessarily disappearing, but that aren't growing, either. Software is letting accounting and finance departments ramp up their productivity per worker. A company can these days grow in complexity and revenues but only needs to staff at replacement levels to keep up with the increased work load. And, as it becomes more and more obvious that there are very real benefits to offloading to service providers rather than maintaining your own data centers, ops teams, and IT departments, companies will.
This isn't surprising. This whole community is formed around the idea that these days, starting a viable business is completely in the power of small teams of smart people. We've talked about the real jobs that are coming along with these companies as they become established, but I would bet that they're running at a level of productivity that shames companies of their size from just 10 years ago.
It's a real question: where are the new jobs coming from? For the next few years, we'll have a nice little bubble in the healthcare industry as the Baby Boomer wave crests, but that's hardly sustainable.
I think the real question is, how are we going to restructure to deal with high levels of unemployment, so that we stay stable and productive? How do we incentivize the smart and capable to keep pushing us forward without completely dropping everyone else?