Eighty percent of current jobs may be replaced by automation in the next several decades.
That’s the conclusion of Stuart W. Elliott in his recent paper, “Anticipating a Luddite Revival.” (Hat tip: RobotEconomics.)
We’ve seen that scale of transformation before. But this one promises to be roughly four times as fast, dwarfing Luddite-era concerns:
…the portion of the workforce employed in agriculture shifted from roughly 80% to just a few percent. However, in the shift out of agriculture, the transformation took place over a century and a half, not several decades.
But there’s a much bigger difference this time — a hard limit that time can’t ameliorate:
The level 6 anchoring tasks in Table 2 are not only difficult for IT and robotics systems to carry out, but they are also difficult for many people to carry out. We do not know how successful the nation can be in trying to prepare everyone in the labor force for jobs that require these higher skill levels. It is hard to imagine, for example, that most of the labor force will move into jobs in health care, education, science, engineering, and law.
I’ve said it before: the median IQ is 100, by definition. Fifty percent of people are below that level. We (and they) are facing a hard cognitive limit that the Luddites never approached. I don’t think anybody reading (or writing) this post can appreciate how hard it would be to make a go of it in today’s technological society — even get through high school, much less provide a healthy, happy, financially secure life for one’s family — with an IQ of 80 or 90.
Are people who aren’t born smart lacking in “merit”? That’s what meritocrats are claiming. (Though they will vociferously defend themselves, deploying endless arguments both specious and obfuscatory.) If you’re in the low-IQ group (and don’t inherit), your miserable position in life is fixed at birth. Get over it.
Currently, work is the only way for the majority of people to legitimately claim any significant share of our remarkable prosperity. (Social-support programs provide a pretty insignificant and tenuous, insecure claim that’s not generally viewed as legitimate, only unfortunately necessary.)
If those folks 1. can’t find jobs that they can do, and 2. receive negligible claims on our prosperity if they are lucky enough to find one of the few remaining, we’re facing a world of haves and have-nots. Sound familiar?
Here’s the depressing chart of fastest-growing job categories and their wage levels that Elliott provides, based on BLS data:
One fundamental belief has to change: that finding and doing a job is the only thing that gives you any claim on a decent life. Because for many, jobs that provide decent claims simply aren’t there, or won’t be soon. (Likewise the belief that rebalancing your financial portfolio annually — doing the arduous, taxing work of “allocating resources” — is extremely meritorious and gives you a just claim on an outsized share of our collective prosperity.)
Horses faced exactly this situation in the first industrial revolution, most of them were moved local farms. They could never learn to drive tractors and trains.
I’ll be the first to say that people aren’t horses. Which gives rise to the ugly next thought:
They shoot horses, don’t they?
Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Notably, the same people that believe in ZMP workers are the same ones that demand that they get jobs and not rely on others. Somehow the incongruity of their position never occurs to them.
Lord, an absolute hallmark of the current far-right/Republican-Party in this country is mindless incongruity, including the mindless recitation of conflicting or absurd cliches. I’ve written a series of sarcastic posts here at AB highlighting this, most recently at http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2014/05/scott-brown-says-no-one-should-work-a-minimum-wage-job-in-the-u-s-forever-instead-they-should-move-to-canada-or-germany-or-france-or.html, regarding Scott Brown, and at http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2014/05/chris-christie-proves-himself-to-be-a-genius-2.html, regarding Chris Christie.
I firmly believe that an ad campaign by the Dems simply showing these comically ridiculous comments by these people, and a quick, sarcastic response of the sort I make in my posts, would make a big difference in November’s election outcomes.
@Bev: Agreed that making fun of them is the thing to do. There is no more powerful rhetorical tool than ridicule.
Why don’t Dems do it? Too nice I guess. Or just foolish.
Great posting but every time I see data on job categories I remember that low-wage jobs are jobs that pay low wages, not vice versa. By that I mean jobs are not inherently, unalterably low-wage (or medium-wage or high-wage). The person who dusts the robot can be well-paid, if we want this. As technology advances, we had better want this.
The economy needs fewer and fewer people. It goes without saying that it is the purpose of people to serve the economy, not the other way around. Well such has been unsaid. Show me a quote by anyone of wealth or of power who has suggested otherwise. In fact even the suggestion that the economy, economics itself, are to serve people is to be seen as a dangerous radical. Every possible discussion of policy always returns to how it will serve the economy.
The assumption is ingrained now to practically the level of DNA that the economy serves people when in fact the idea is now absurd.
Many, maybe most of the low wage and especially unpaid jobs are those that support other low wage people. The society is split into a thin layer of wealthy, and a much thicker layer of people whose chief activity is the sustenance-level support of each other, and incidentally of the rich.
Reminds me of free range cattle grazing out west. The cattle struggle along, breed and defend themselves, only occasionally harvested by the distant owners who decide how many shall be herded in and … utilized.
Noni
Well yeah, they shoot horses. Some horses. They don’t shoot Kentucky Derby winners, or horses which might sire Kentucky Derby winners. So. the moral is, we don’t want to live in a country which has 320 million people. most of them so dumb they have to be individually taught to press the big key with an elephant on it when they are hauled in to cast their votes.
We’d be better off in a country with 320 million people, with an average IQ of say 115, most of whom have or will eventually gain BA or BSc degrees in college– and who have appropriate jobs. We’d be even better off in a country with 320 million people, with an average IQ fo say 150, most of whom have or will gain PhD or MBA or LLD degrees — and who have appropriate jobs. Even better yet …
We seem to have three major futures open to us. Here’s one, which seems to apply to liberals: We set the country up so most of the population essentially lives on retirement pay all their lives, with affluence produced by computers and cleverly designed government policies. Here’s another, which appeals to conservatives: We set things up so stupid and poor and improperly socialized folk sink into poverty or quietly die behind dumpsters before they affect the taxes paid by rich and intelligent and productive citizens.
Here’s a third, which appeals to no one: In 2020 or so, 1% of unborn fetuses are scanned for genetic characteristics to ensure they are unlikely to develop Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia and likely to be long-lived and tall and have IQs of 110 or better. In 2030, 5% of unborn fetuses are scanned for these characteristics, the potential for strokes is also looked for, and IQs of 115 or better are sought. In 2040, 20% of fetuses are scanned, genes promoting hemophilia and diabetes are looked for, and IQ levels of 120 or better are standard. In 2050 …
I understand, no decent human being can view this third possibility with anything but horror and revulsion. This isn’t what Americans want! Is there some way to force such horror and revulsion onto the sort of megalomaniacs who rule in snake pits like mainland China, Nigeria, Argentina, the Netherlands, etc?
They could always go into politics…or blogging.
PJR Rapier
exactly
Shupp, I couldn’t tell if you were being sarcastic.
In any case, even those with iq’s much higher than 100 will not be safe.
And if Tim Geithner is an example of high iq, i think maybe high iq is not the way to go.
There are, I think, plenty of jobs that need doing that don’t require high iq’s. The high iq jobs are mostly keeping the machinery running (and keeping track of the money) for an economy that makes us sick.
I don’t know how far that understanding can be pushed. But I think I’d be pretty slow to conclude that high iq people are somehow “better than” low iq people.
Coberly:
I’m being semi-sarcastic. It seems likely we’re headed for a train wreck over this unemployment issue. I think liberals will attempt to ameliorate things by tinkering with social policy (longer unemployment payments, for example). And I’m absolutely certain conservatives will resist every inch, on the grounds that the wealth they’ve earned is being stolen by a despotic government to be wasted on people who don’t deserve it. This isn’t a path leading to an ever improving future, in other words.
If we can’t improve things sufficiently through government, perhaps we can improve things by changing people — effectively, through changing their genetics. Granted, higher intelligence may not be a panacea. Reducing the rates of certain illnesses however, such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, pretty clearly would be a godsend. And perhaps a population with steadily rising intelligence, health, and wealth would be a bit better at improving society than what we have today.
That said, I’ve noticed that people find the idea of improving human genetics distasteful. It smacks of “eugenics” (well, it is eugenics) and they instantly form images of Nazi-style crematoria and drunken abortionists and poor black women in southern states being sterilized en masse while Supreme Court justices lean over the operating tables, leering at them. And yet the reality is that people today are examining their genetic susceptibility to various illnesses, that doctors do indeed screen fetuses for genetic problems, that parents do choose to abort babies with problems (having two X-chromosomes being the most common, let’s admit), and that this is going on around the world.
I think this means the world is taking my third choice.
Shupp
as you explain it… “eugenics” has always been practiced by women looking for smarter men.
but you need to keep in mind that at the end of the day… your newer, brighter population… the average IQ will still be 100.
moreover, “average wealth” will still be “not rich” and envy and greed will always be with us.
that said, i get to say again, be careful about overvaluing what you think of as “intelligence.” yeah, i know, it’s delightful when you run into it and it agrees with you. but morlock intelligence is more like what we will get.
meanwhile i know lots of jobs done by people who would not score high on an iq test… and the jobs take something that looks very like intelligence to me… sometimes more than i have in that situation at least. i have seen too many David Brookses to have a very high opinion of “intelligence” in the abstract.
Steve:
Soylent Green?
Martin Ford wrote a few posts at AB a few years back and before you and Jazz were posting here. “The Lights In The Tunnel” was the name of his book and he wrote about the impact of automation would have on the nation’s economy as 40 – 50% of people would suddenly have more leisure time. http://econfuture.wordpress.com/ econfuture | Robots, AI and Unemployment | Future Economics and Technology
Quite a few people could not grasp the likelihood of this happening and yet over the last few years we are drifting closer to the reality of it in job elimination. I think there is more to it than just automation causing the elimination of Labor. I am pretty sure Wall Street and TBTF have found a way to eliminate or minimize Labor in the quest for Productivity Gains resulting from Capital.
Sandwichman recently posted a few articles on AB and one touched upon minimizing the numbers of hours worked and the resulting cost increase which was also surprisingly minimal. Does it really make sense to work >40 hours per week when there is a need for greater employment and by doing so, efficiency in through decreases?
There’s another question. Let’s make two suppositions — that soon, most work will be done in the US by mechanical or imported, contingent labour, and that the very wealthy are the ones who will determine how many native born Americans are employed or otherwise supported so they can live a decent life here.
Then the question is, how large a population do the wealthy need, in order to maintain the US as a pleasant home base, fortress and society to support their families and replenish their numbers?
Clearly, if America consisted ONLY of the .01%, a population of about 33,000 owners, plus imported hired help, it would be not only an empty, echoing nation, but a nation ripe to be taken over. Plus, their cost of living would probably zoom, as there would be no population mass to keep costs down via scaling.
But setting aside this science fiction scenario, look at the current US situation. With the middle class disappearing, what social environment are the next generation of super wealthy looking at? One where their freedom and safety are curtailed, where they are on a lavish raft drifting in a sea of sharks? Wealthy people in poor nations have the utility of their wealth steeply constrained. Making your home base into a poor nation is a real bad idea.
Noni
@run75441 et. al.:
Big-picture response: the whole point of increasing productivity is to have more stuff and less work. A rather utopian (but actually realistic) vision. Think: replicators creating everthing, almost nobody working.
But: if the only way to lay claim to that prosperity is by working, and all the valuable work is being done by robots…
To repeat the key sentence in the post:
“One fundamental belief has to change: that finding and doing a job is the only thing that gives you any claim on a decent life.”
Steve Roth
I agree with your key sentence.
But I am a pessimist. Perhaps because I live in a neighborhood where people throw their trash out of their car window as they speed past on their way to the store to buy another six pack.
Nor do I like the talk about “IQ” because what I have seen is that high IQ is almost the same as “idiot savant”…people who have a special talent at some of the tricks valued by the economy as it currently is… and therefore quite smug in their delusions of “superiority.”
So I go out in the country where people are generally quite decent if you don’t mind their love affair with guns or their twisted “hate thy neighbor” version of “christianity.” Or look into the cities where people can’t seem to find any other meaning to life but sex and drugs.
Or back out to the remote non-farm country where because the population is so i i can never get more than five minutes away from some other human… probably someone much like me but still not what i went into the wilderness for.
in other words, it’s fine what you say, but it doesn’t begin to solve the problem.
@Coberly: Key to this is losing a whole lot of that moralizing (though you can never get rid of it all, nor would you want to).
IOW: Yeah, we’re going to give everybody money. And since they’re human beings, hence all fucked up every which way from Sunday (it was not an intelligent designer), they’re not gonna really deserve it, and they’re gonna spend some/a lot of it on decidedly non-salutary uses.
The only answer to which is: STFU. Get over it. They’re humans. (Or at least citizens.) They deserve a decent share of our remarkably prosperous pie, just for existing. Even if their abilities (for which IQ is only a rough and sloppy and incomplete and unfair measure) aren’t so great, and their predilections aren’t what others might consider to be “good.”
Will this happen? Only very, very slowly. Decades. Centuries. The human “moralizing” gene is incredibly powerful. But so is the revenge gene, and we’ve managed to tame that to an extraordinary extent over the millennia, to a great extent by giving state societies ever-greater monopolies on the use of violence. (If you want to argue about that last, fine, but I won’t engage until you’ve read at least 50% of The Better Angels of Our Nature, and internalized the important statistics therein.)