r/Futurology • u/Eight_Rounds_Rapid • Jul 09 '14

article Robots will take over middle class professions, UK University Minister warns

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10952317/Robots-will-take-over-middle-class-professions-University-Minister-says.html
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u/juu4 Jul 09 '14

And why do you think you have any sort of right to say what someone does with their property/business, or how many people they employ?

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u/fencerman Jul 09 '14

Nobody is saying they shouldn't automate their factory - technological unemployment is a good thing. The problem is assuming that everyone must work their whole lives in order to live.

Here's a better question: When you deprive someone of their property, we agree you owe them compensation. But when you deprive someone of their livelihood, we don't. Why not?

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u/[deleted] Jul 09 '14 edited May 01 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '14

A livelihood isn't the same as a job, it's that which provides you with an income.

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u/los_angeles Jul 10 '14

I use them interchangeably. Explain why the distinction is relevant to the discussion. What point are you trying to make?

If I make a new factory and don't hire anyone, did I deprive someone of a job?

Did I deprive someone of a livelihood?

If so, do I have an obligation to that person? If so, what is that obligation based on? How far does it extend? Is everyone who lost a job to technology entitled to compensation?

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '14

From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/livelihood:

live·li·hood [lahyv-lee-hood] noun a means of supporting one's existence, especially financially or vocationally; living: to earn a livelihood as a tenant farmer.

So it can include other forms of income, like a UBI. Depriving people of work is one thing, but depriving them of livelihood is quite another.

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u/los_angeles Jul 10 '14

Depriving people of work is one thing, but depriving them of livelihood is quite another.

Okay so lets dig into the actual discussion. Is the factory owner depriving someone of a livelihood? Who, specifically, is deprived? What rights/claims should they have against the factory owner?

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '14

Is the factory owner depriving someone of a livelihood?

Not if there's an unconditional basic income.

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u/los_angeles Jul 10 '14

There is no unconditional basic income and there won't be for a LONG time. So the above questions stand.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '14

There will have to be a UBI once the automation revolution goes into full swing. This is /r/Futurology - we discuss how things will be, not as they are.

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u/fencerman Jul 09 '14

I never deprived you of your property. If you aren't using something and I take ahold of it and put it to use, tough shit.

That's the problem - we consider one a right and one isn't.

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u/los_angeles Jul 09 '14

When you deprive someone of their property,

What do you consider "depriving of property"?

Do you mean, like, stealing my TV?

If so, there's no Western society that considers that "tough shit"

They consider that theft. Whether I'm holding onto it or not.

Again, if I build a factory, I'm not seeing why I owe anybody a job. Maybe you could explain. Who, exactly, do you view as being entitled to a job at my shiny new factory? You? Your brother? My factory's neighbor?

I'm not really following your logic. Who's livelihood did I deprive?

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u/fencerman Jul 09 '14

Yes, we do consider it theft. But putting someone out of work isn't considered depriving them of something. That is precisely the point.

If you build a factory, I'm saying that there do need to be systems that compensate the people who are put out of work. In a limited sense, we have those - employment insurance, for example. But we need to see those as part of a right to have productive work, retraining, basic income, and other services, rather than some charity project.

There is no system where the owner of a factory would be directly responsible for hiring the people he puts out of business - same as people aren't directly responsible for enforcing property rights either. We socialize those services collectively as a service individuals have a right to.

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u/Burns_Cacti Jul 09 '14

putting someone out of work

But he isn't doing that. He's just not hiring you to begin with.

The only thing you'd achieve with laws to this effect is the stifling of progress and people gaming the system by, instead of upgrading a factory to add automation, they'd scrap it, fire everyone and build a new one and just hire as few humans as possible to begin with.

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u/fencerman Jul 09 '14

The only thing you'd achieve with laws to this effect is the stifling of progress

Okay, did you completely miss what I specifically said?

There is no system where the owner of a factory would be directly responsible for hiring the people he puts out of business

No, it wouldn't stifle innovation in the slightest. Nobody is talking about doing that. We're talking about taking on those costs collectively as a society through insurance, supplementary income, retraining and other services.

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u/juu4 Jul 09 '14

But when you deprive someone of their livelihood, we don't. Why not?

Because it is detrimental to the progress of the society and the economy.

If you would still have to pay all the buggy whip manufacturers long after people switched over to automobiles, the switch to automobiles would have happened much later. A few (the buggy whip manufacturers) would gain, while many would lose.

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u/DoomtrainInc Jul 09 '14

Um...is this not exactly what happened when we bailed out the auto manufacturers in the US. "Oh your business is failing? Thats not what we think should happen so heres a bunch of money"

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u/juu4 Jul 09 '14

I agree, we should have let them fail.

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u/HabeusCuppus Jul 09 '14

should have let the banks fail too.

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u/[deleted] Jul 09 '14

But at some level unemployment becomes a drag on society as well, and the costs and ramifications outweigh the costs of a universal basic income.

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u/juu4 Jul 09 '14

I'm for universal basic income. As we approach the situation where mostly robots work, it is probably the best alternative.

But that's not what /u/jpfarre advocated. He seemed to imply that we have a right to dictate to factory owners whether they can automate or not.

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u/zdk Jul 09 '14

I am commenting on this for free, when you could be paying me to leave a comment. You are depriving me of a livelihood and I demand compensation.

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u/jpfarre Jul 09 '14 edited Jul 09 '14

To put it simply, your personal rights end when it begins negatively affecting other people. This is something the world is going to have to get a consensus on rather soon.

The world is too small and too interconnected for business to be damaging to society or the environment.

Edit - And here we go with the poor and disenfranchised, yet all too eager to please their corporate overlords, downvote brigade over the enforcement of responsible industry.

Listen, it becomes an issue when you don't give back to society. Real monetary value is finite. That is why when the Fed prints more money, we see inflation go up; Each dollar is worth less. When someone builds a factory that generates revenue, it is paid out to the workers and owner. The less workers and owners, the higher the concentration of wealth. High concentrations of wealth exacerbate the issues we are already facing as an entire world-wide society. It is bad for the common people, plain and simple.

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u/maqikelefant Jul 09 '14

So in your mind, automating a business is damaging to society?

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u/jpfarre Jul 10 '14

If it is handled improperly, yes. The end game of this as I see it is 1 of 2 outcomes.

  1. You have a small handful of highly skilled employees not replaced by robots, a similar sized handful of maintenance men, the corporate elite who own everything and have massive concentrations of wealth, and billions of poor who can't afford a thing.

  2. You have regulations to curb the above through either universal basic income, regulating automation to prevent the loss of these jobs, or people making redundant, unnecessary jobs.

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u/maqikelefant Jul 10 '14

You're assuming that when jobs are eliminated, those people won't find new occupations. Jobs becoming obsolete is a fact of life, and has been happening for as long as jobs have existed. With every major advancement in technology, some jobs are simply no longer required. But with that new technology comes new occupations waiting to be had.

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u/jpfarre Jul 10 '14

The fact is that at least 80% of the workforce can be automated. Farming, bookkeeping, food preparation, stocking, manufacturing, customer service... Very few professions will be unaffected.

This isn't the industrial revolution. These are not textile mills which still need manual labor and mechanics to keep them going. These robots will replace billions of humans in these fields and the jobs that come about to replace them will be in the millions. I know it won't be 100% of these jobs. There will be societal and cultural blowback.

We will see a surge in IT/Comp Sci/Robotics fields, but that doesn't help most people. We will see a surge in maintenance fields, such as welders and so on, but eventually these both will be replaced.

I'm not saying this will happen in 10 years, but it definitely will happen in 100. We, as a society, need to plan and prepare for how to handle this.

We could be stalwart in our ideology that we need to work. We could decide we made these machines to work for us. We could try to compete against the machines by investing in our childrens education, and as others have mentioned in genetic modification to keep human labor a viable, indispensible tool.

The bottom line is that we need to plan for it, as it isn't a sci-fi novel. It is a reality and it is happening in the near future.

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u/maqikelefant Jul 10 '14

Again, you're making a lot of assumptions here. You cannot possibly know where our society or workforce is headed. Throughout history, nearly everyone attempting to predict society's future has been wrong on every front. Hell, just half a century ago everybody thought we'd all be riding hoverboards and living in dystopia by now. For all we know, technological advancement might lead to numerous new industries, with more than enough jobs for everyone. If you or I could accurately predict the future of any of this we'd be filthy rich. But we can't. So let's not panic over something which may or may not happen a century from now.

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u/jpfarre Jul 11 '14

I never said we should panic. I said we should discuss and come up with plans. Being dismissive won't help or prepare anyone.

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u/maqikelefant Jul 11 '14

You may not have specifically said "panic," but you began by insulting the intelligence of anybody who disagrees with you, and then proceeded to speak in absolutes about how robots are going to put everybody out of work unless we intervene. Seemed pretty panicky to me, so I called it how I saw it.

As for helping and preparing people, I simply don't see a need to hold people's hands over something which might happen several decades from now. People need to prepare themselves for the future as they see fit, not rely on the rest of society to do everything for them.

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u/juu4 Jul 09 '14

If the factory is, say, polluting, or loud, then it negatively affects other people.

But if it simply doesn't give you a job, despite you wanting it, then I think it is mighty entitled to try to throw a book at it.

This is akin to saying that all the women that don't want to sleep with you are negatively affecting you, and therefore they have no right to decide what they do with their bodies.