Martin Ford, author of two books on technological unemployment, Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating...
Originally shared by Wayne Radinsky
Martin Ford, author of two books on technological unemployment, Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future and Rise Of The Robots: Technology and The Threat of a Jobless Future, interviewed by Nikola Danaylov. He says when routine, repetitive farm work was automated, people moved to routine, repetitive factory work. When routine, repetitive factory work was automated, people moved to routine, repetitive service industry work. Now, robots and machine learning are coming after all jobs that are routine and repetitive. Can people make the transition to the jobs that are genuinely non-routine, and non-repetitive, like highly creative work? If they can, that would be genuinely different from anything that's happened in the past. He's doubtful we can pull that off.
The economic dogma is that as the economy grows, everyone is better off, and that happened until the mid 1970s -- the line for productivity and the line for average wages move in exact lockstep. Now there's this big gap opening up between wages and productivity.
The incoming going to labor as opposed to capital has been falling. Each decade has produced fewer jobs as a percentage of population than the decade before. In the last decade we didn't create any new jobs at all, as a percentage of population. Jobless recoveries get longer and longer.
People usually give explanations like globalization, the decline of unions, or various political changes, but these don't explain all these trends together holistically.
People who argue it only affects low-skilled workers are starting to be wrong -- machines are starting to come after high-skilled jobs. Education is becoming less effective.
What about the argument that technology is bringing China and many other poor countries out of poverty? He says that's true, but China is already starting to be affected by factory automation, and it's a big concern because China is heavily dependent on manufacturing. Also, China and other poor countries are dependent on Western consumer markets for demand for their manufactured products. Other countries, poorer than China, might in the future find the traditional path out of poverty, which is to start by creating millions of unskilled factory jobs, unavailable to them, if Western consumer markets, which the factories traditionally served, are being supplied by a new manufacturing paradigm.
Economists say this isn't happening because if the robots were really taking over all the jobs, there ought to be a "productivity surge" in the economic statistics, but Ford doesn't think that can happen because goods and especially services are only made in response to demand, and people are having less and less to spend. Economists are looking only at the supply side and not the demand side of the equation, but productivity statistics are a reflection of both. So there will never be a "productivity surge."
Ford suggests as a solution, a guaranteed basic income, that starts as a small level, so the incentive to work is maintained.
Both Ford and Danaylov are concerned we are headed towards political instability. Ford describes himself as a "long-term optimist but a short-term pessimist."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKsrNKIEMBE
Martin Ford, author of two books on technological unemployment, Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future and Rise Of The Robots: Technology and The Threat of a Jobless Future, interviewed by Nikola Danaylov. He says when routine, repetitive farm work was automated, people moved to routine, repetitive factory work. When routine, repetitive factory work was automated, people moved to routine, repetitive service industry work. Now, robots and machine learning are coming after all jobs that are routine and repetitive. Can people make the transition to the jobs that are genuinely non-routine, and non-repetitive, like highly creative work? If they can, that would be genuinely different from anything that's happened in the past. He's doubtful we can pull that off.
The economic dogma is that as the economy grows, everyone is better off, and that happened until the mid 1970s -- the line for productivity and the line for average wages move in exact lockstep. Now there's this big gap opening up between wages and productivity.
The incoming going to labor as opposed to capital has been falling. Each decade has produced fewer jobs as a percentage of population than the decade before. In the last decade we didn't create any new jobs at all, as a percentage of population. Jobless recoveries get longer and longer.
People usually give explanations like globalization, the decline of unions, or various political changes, but these don't explain all these trends together holistically.
People who argue it only affects low-skilled workers are starting to be wrong -- machines are starting to come after high-skilled jobs. Education is becoming less effective.
What about the argument that technology is bringing China and many other poor countries out of poverty? He says that's true, but China is already starting to be affected by factory automation, and it's a big concern because China is heavily dependent on manufacturing. Also, China and other poor countries are dependent on Western consumer markets for demand for their manufactured products. Other countries, poorer than China, might in the future find the traditional path out of poverty, which is to start by creating millions of unskilled factory jobs, unavailable to them, if Western consumer markets, which the factories traditionally served, are being supplied by a new manufacturing paradigm.
Economists say this isn't happening because if the robots were really taking over all the jobs, there ought to be a "productivity surge" in the economic statistics, but Ford doesn't think that can happen because goods and especially services are only made in response to demand, and people are having less and less to spend. Economists are looking only at the supply side and not the demand side of the equation, but productivity statistics are a reflection of both. So there will never be a "productivity surge."
Ford suggests as a solution, a guaranteed basic income, that starts as a small level, so the incentive to work is maintained.
Both Ford and Danaylov are concerned we are headed towards political instability. Ford describes himself as a "long-term optimist but a short-term pessimist."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKsrNKIEMBE
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