Humans Need Not Apply
August 29, 2014I’ve been thinking about that video a fair amount the last couple weeks. It reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano.
That novel is very poignant in regards to the recession starting in 2008. Layoffs were intense. Unemployment doubled in just over a year. Many companies’ profits bounced back but employment did not. Turns out they didn’t need the people they let go.
Worker productivity has gone through the roof yet wages have no increased with it. People are becoming productive enough to work themselves (or, more likely, less skilled workers) out of jobs.
How do we combat the increased joblessness?
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, the people rebel and destroy the machines. They’d rather work with a harder life than do nothing. There are the Marxist predictions of workers overthrowing the capitalists with a revolution. There are the ideas of Basic Income or Universal Income which are starting to get more attention.
The reality from the video is that individual productivity will only continue to increase as automation continues to increase. This will lead to more and more people unable to keep up in the workforce. This will lead to massive unemployment and an even wider wealth and pay disparity between the rich and the poor. That’s how revolutions, often violent, happen.
It’s not inevitable that that will happen. We can handle it with smart policies. I just don’t know that we will. Will libertarians who would leave it to purely market forces realize that despite their idyllic and logical world view their utopia is not pragmatic and is unattainable? I like the ideas of that movement, but just like communism treats people like robots unmoved by emotion and personal achievement, libertarianism treats them like purely rational beings. Humans are neither extreme and neither is society.
Hopefully, before it’s too late, we realize that these are problems. Maybe not problems of the next couple years as claimed in the video, but certainly in our lifetime.
