I read an article not too long ago that claimed automation wasn’t reducing jobs. The reason this article gave was that productivity has declined. First: the increase in the rate of productivity has slowed, but productivity continues to grow if below predicted rates. Now, there are a myriad of reasons for this, one of the major ones being that most of the work being done in manufacturing has already been moved to the third world and almost all of the low hanging fruit in terms of productivity improvement has already been picked. The question is, does it really mean that jobs are safe from automation?

Previous Iterations of Automation

In the past automation has resulted in job loss in the short term, but a net increase in employment. That’s a thing that a lot of people especially economists keep saying. When agriculture was replaced with factory work the number of people who worked increased. When the horses were replaced with cars the number of people who worked increased. Every time, the number of people who work increases.

But is this time different?

Every time, everyone says that this wave of automation is different. Thing is, this time it’s actually different. The difference is fundamental to the way automation is happening this time. In the past automation was new ways of doing specific things. All of a sudden weaving could be done with a minimum of skill and replicated precisely, or maybe it was more like goods could be moved much, much further for a fraction of the cost.

This time it’s everything. Not all at once, of course, but over time. Every single task humans can do is slowly being automated. It’s not in a “now we have a machine that does this” way, but instead in a “now we have a machine that can learn to do things” way. Sure, we’ll come up with new jobs that we can’t imagine yet. The thing is, the machines will be able to do those things too.

“But I do X and W will always need humans”

No. I used to work in education. I can see quite easily how I could have become redundant. It hasn’t happened yet, but there are educational models that things like deep learning and big data will enable that will make what I did look sad and stone age by comparison. Right now I work as a programmer and a writer. Both of those jobs are being automated right now, to a huge degree.

Jobs that need a human touch, human interaction, right now those are pretty safe. I would say that in a generation or two they aren’t. People are becoming more comfortable interacting with machines than they are interacting with humans. That human touch only matters so long as it matters to humans.

Imagination isn’t something we see as being automatable, but it is. Big data actually does a great job automating away humans, as does GANS. Right now both are relatively young fields, but already they have taken on dozens of areas that humans thought we were going to be the best at for a very long time. Give it five years and the things that are going to be happening with GANS are going to blow your mind. Hell, computers are going to put most actors out of work in the very near future.

After all, one problem facing the MCU is that, unlike comic books, the actors in the movies age. If you can create a virtual Robert Downey Jr. maybe he can keep heading up the avengers for a hundred movies, a thousand. Deep fakes are already hitting the point where that’s within the realm of imagination.

Machines write novels, compose music, paint, draw, etc.

So We Are All Fucked?

Maybe. That’s why I’m such a big proponent of a UBI. We need to implement it, and we need to do it sooner than later. Once automation is in full swing it’s going to be too late for a lot of people. The people will be homeless, starving, suffering from the lack of healthcare (at least for those of you south of me).

A UBI lets people survive now and into the future. It kickstarts the economy in a very real way and it provides some real solutions.

What About the Lack of Productivity?

What drives productivity? Why would a company invest energy in making more stuff? Well, if there’s demand. See, we are all so blind to the role the narrative around supply-side economics takes on that we don’t question it most of the time. Why hasn’t productivity increased when measured as units produced per hour? Well, why should it?

We can’t actually use more stuff, at least not in the western world. We have all the gadgets, all the knick-knacks, all the kibble we could ever use. We have phones and iPads and cars that last three years. It’s a sickness of consumption, and we are consuming as fast as it’s possible to consume. Consumption is literally killing us, and still, we keep doing it. The thing is, that puts a hard limit on demand. Increasing production means upping the supply, but there’s no increase in demand. After all, the only place an increase in demand can come from is an increase in per-capita consumption or an increase in population. In the industrialized nations the only increase in population we are seeing is immigration, and we are increasingly hostile to it. As I said above, we can’t increase per-capita consumption.

So, produce more and you don’t sell more. There’s no reason to increase productivity. Since it takes investment, why bother? Still, it’s happening in a quiet sort of way. We are at this cusp of automation where it’s going to be a paper increase in productivity very soon. Of course, it’s going to be achieved all at once, not piecemeal. Once we hit the tipping point with machine intelligence and robotics we are going to see a massive decrease in the number of people in the workforce. Total productivity might not even go up, but per-capita productivity will. The same amount of stuff will be produced with fewer people.

Conclusion

We are at a tipping point. Our current course isn’t sustainable. The people who try to say it is aren’t really looking at the implications of what’s happening. They are looking at the world as it used to be and trying to say that means it will always be that way. Self-driving cars aren’t just self-driving cars, they are autonomous systems with superior to human image processing and decision making skills on a level with ours, at least in their realm. That’s with today's computing technology. Up that tech by five years and add in the advances being made in batteries, the social changes that mean we are less concerned about needing to interact with humans, there are damned few jobs that are safe. A UBI is probably the only method we have on the table to allow us to survive that transition as a functioning society.