Freedomain Radio

 

 

devilsadvocate:

Why should the free market want to employ humans, who demand for better working conditions, who want higher wages, medical and dental, who go on strike and most importantly, are less efficient.

To be clear, the free market is not a big company, and if you replace 'free market' with 'big company' in your argument, it's exactly the same argument. The free market basically means: whatever people want to do without initiating violence. Companies are optional.

Other than that, I don't understand the problem. If we're looking at the history of computers, computers started out being owned only by big companies...then they moved to being affordable to everyone. Assuming that this time, surely only big companies will have access to technology is quite a flaw in your argument.

Even if we can't get employment but we have robots (or some other technology), surely people can buy them or rent use of them (or even buy some and rent them out to help others nearby out) and produce products independently and hire their friends as workers and salesmen and negotiators (they can get their own health insurance independently, since we are free and health insurance isn't forced to be bundled with the place you work; who thought those going together made sense anyway? it's like a company grocery store or something). And, I mean, if we have gardening robots or something, why do we need to work at all?

 

What you fail to account for is the fact that with every technological advance there is always a fully employed staff behind that invention, hundreds if not thousands more responsible for maitenence, and millions of jobs opened up BECAUSE of that technological advance.  Let's take farming, we advanced to the point where little human labor is needed, and this in turn creates prosperity because more people have the time to do what they want / INVENT new things.  All this free time allows for innovation and what not to occur and this in turn creates more jobs.

 

The only thing that artifically creates jobs is government(public service) jobs which are little more than a ponzi scheme in which for every 1$ put in you get back $.10 if your lucky.  A free-market by definition creates a higher standard of living and more prosperity by creating wealth and REAL employment.  In terms of technology, there MAY come a point where all labor jobs are obsolete but this should be a cause for rejoicing not of sorrow because at that point in time the standard of living will be so great that it would be more economical to have someone employed and an active consumer rather then someone homeless.

"Technolgical unemployment" is a broken window fallacy that could be used as an arguement against any technological change no matter how primitive or advanced the times are.

Production should be the objective rather than employment. The Soviet Union had full employment while millions starved.

Employing millions to dig holes and fill them up doesn't produce anything.

The problem (in the U.S. and elsewhere) consists of a massive parasite class, which consumes while producing little or nothing, and the State which impedes production.

Computer programmer. Do you know how many programming jobs are sitting out there unfilled? Now! In this crappy economy! If you are only slightly above average, you can pretty much land a sweet gig in all of about 2 days if you need to, or you can be picky if you wish. There have been millions of jobs created because of the invention and constant innovation of theses devices. There will be millions more created by products and services that simply could not exist without computers, and that no one had previously thought possible. This assuming that our slide into tyranny halts and reverses. 

 

Oustide your door is an ocean. Be a fish. 

devilsadvocate:

2: The problem with technological unemployment is that the mass population wont have the purchasing power necessary to consume life sustaining resources, the way people get purchasing power is through jobs.  I don't think just big companies will get advanced computer technology, I think you and I will have a watson on our wrists someday.

Right, but if we have the Watsons on our wrists and presumably the robots in our houses, why couldn't we produce things to sell entrepreneurially? Even without robots, what prevents us from making and selling to all those other people and offering better service by perhaps delivering it directly to their door within the hour? Even without cash, there's barter, there's offering to improve the property of others (like flour and sugar into cookies) in exchange for part of that property or some cash, there's borrowing a robot owned by some rich person in exchange for some of what you produce when the robot owner had to provide no raw materials. There's all sorts of creative arrangements. What safe for you but unjoblike arrangements might you be willing to offer to others if you were starving? Remember that the state's rules aren't forcing you to make arrangements in any standard kind of way at all.

If you practice that kind of realistic imaginative power, you will be much more able to understand anarchism, even if you don't end up accepting anarchism.

I will say, though, that if the people who provided you access to what you needed (your parents, your teachers, your bosses) have been mostly or entirely callous to your emotional or physical needs, that can make it quite difficult to imagine that you can ever succeed, since it will be quite natural for you to come up with objections like the robot owners would never provide access in return for part of the production and so on.

Devil: I am a programmer, but my point is not that you should become a programmer. My point is that there are millions of jobs created around the computer; so many in fact, that you can specialize even further into the segment of your choice. Programming, networking, hardware, logistics, system architecture, telecommunications, management, sales, support, etc.  the creation and innovation of the computer has created a gain of jobs, not a loss. 

 

To answer your questions, I started as a web site content creator back in the late 1990's. From there I went into ASP, where I created programs that in effect made my position as content creator obsolete. Of course, it only meant that I could now do cooler things, like more application development. In my career I have pretty much filled all roles in the industry. I was in logistics and architecture while living on the gulf coast when Katrina hit. While the scientists I worked with hung dry wall to repair the damaged building, It was up to me to ensure that they could again be scientists by staring from the ground up with IT infrastructure for our business. Since that time, I have been a developer only, because that is in the highest demand. C#, VB.Net, and Java are my primary languages.

If computers interest you, then I would learn all about them. I think the best programmers know networking and architecture/logistics as well as coding. Today, many of the programmers we get are not curious about technology and they only know code. In my opinion, coding is 1/6th of being a good programmer. Coding without context is inefficient and leads to bad products. 

Also to devils advocate: I do not think that all unemployed people should become programmers. I think that if they were programmers, they would not be unemployed. It is certainly not for everyone but then what is?

The trend in business software development is moving towards the SAS (software as a service) model, the biggest players being Salesforce, Amazon, and Facebook. Developing on these platforms is in super high demand. I still veiw the model itself with trepidation, but it does open up the world for developers and the organizations for which they work because it makes information a commodity. I no longer have to reinvent the wheel when I want to consume, integrate, or expose information. If my company has some information that can be shared, it takes a small investment in development time to offer it as service thereby creating a new product with processes around it. On the other hand, I do not need to develop an application around airport data, for example, when I can simply ask for the data from someone who already has via an API. Businesses now cooperate on this level more and more each day. It makes sense. It saves money and it creates new revenue out of something that had been a liability. This efficiency does not result in the loss of jobs, it creates new ones. 

I dont know if these have been covered yet, if so then please ignore:

1) With every job that's automated, come numerous more jobs to maintain, repair, design, market that automation. Entire industries can be built upon just automating one position. If we took away all of the technology we use today, millions would be out of work. A simple example is your computer, we could be mailing each other our responses, but the computer and internet remove the need for mail. While the mailing industry does take a hit, dozens of industries and millions of jobs are created in the IT sector.

2) I think the idea of technological unemployment comes from a fallacy that's something like "technology is magic", instead of "technology is a series of complicated machines". If one were to view technology as magic, it would easy to see the obsoleteness of human labor; thereby extrapolating that obsoleteness into mass unemployment. 

3) Even if we were to assume that technology does eliminate jobs overall, the free market would correct for that through lowered prices. If you can completely automate the production of food, to the point where it costs nothing to produce it on the supply side, while demand remains the same, the price at the supermarket drops to nearly zero. Increasing supply with stable demand creates a lower price ultimately to zero. So basically, if everything were automated, we wouldn't need money, because the robots would build everything for free.

Just joined this forum, jumping in a bit late..

This is something I worry about myself.  I think if the current political and economic system remains and robots become common, we could see 50% unemployment, forever.  I’m even more concerned about the military use of robots.  Imagine how much more apathetic the general US population would become towards war if there were hardly any US casualties because robots were fighting. 

In a free market, if an industry replaced most of its workers with robots prices should lower a great deal.  There are many industries where labor is the biggest cost.  With lower prices consumers would then have money to buy different things.  In a free market cost savings are passed onto the consumer, who then spends money on something else which creates growth in new areas that offset losses in other areas.  Our current system distorts the market so the consumer doesn’t see huge drops in prices; most of it goes to Walmart as profits.  The current practice of shipping goods halfway around the world is insane and is a result of an artificially devalued currency, un-enforced environmental regulations, and no labor rights in China. 

Also, consider that labor in Asia is already very cheap.  Maybe cheaper than the energy and maintenance costs to run a robot.  After perhaps 10 years a factory would need to buy a new robot, however it doesn’t cost much to replace a factory worker that doesn’t produce. 

Regarding career choices, I build web sites, here are a few things to consider: 

It is hard to learn and not everyone is able to achieve the skill level necessary to earn a good living.  Schools don’t adequately prepare people for jobs.  To remain employable you have to spend a lot of time constantly learning new technologies.  You have to be able to teach yourself.  There is no other profession that requires learning new skills at this level. 

There are a lot of jobs available, however most require 3 years experience, and a laundry list of skills.  The money is pretty good, but you may end up working 60+ hours a week (no joke).   If you look at companies like Google you will see they have amazing campuses with every imaginable amenity, free food, games etc; this is because people who work there never leave.  Right now there is a bubble in internet startups, this will end eventually, who knows what the job market will look like in the future.  The tech industry goes through booms and busts. 

The ability to design and build a web site gives you the power to start your own business cheaply. 

If you’re not technically inclined try looking into marketing.  Every company has to sell its goods to survive and although it isn’t rocket science it is hard to find people who are good at it.  Most of the high level management in corporations comes from sales and marketing (unfortunately).

devilsadvocate:

 

Love the show, haven't been converted yet.  There are a few core assumptions I have that need to be addressed before I can honestly make the transition.

Interesting show suggestion.

What better way to ensure that technology puts people out of work in a free market than to request that time, energy, research and resources be used to create a show that covers that very topic without paying for it, even at the $5 a month subscription level.

Yes, it is amazing how technology is putting people out of work in the so-called free market, isn't it.... devilsadvocate?