[C8]

Automation rapidly growing in all areas of business. Computers, robots, and manufacturing equipment do the work millions of people once did. And the list of jobs endangered by newer technologies just keeps growing: drones to deliver pizzas, AI to design new software, entire garment factories with only a handful of people, etc.

On the other side, the population just keeps booming worldwide. We have more illiterate, poorly educated people than ever before (many migrating to wealthy nations that already have unemployment problems).

Historically this has meant trouble. Empires for many years realized that a large, and idle, population of males does not lead to good things. Roman roads and the Great Wall of China were built, partly, because leaders realized men have to be kept busy or things quickly get out of hand.

I am actually more concerned about this collision more than global warming or Peak Oil. Large amounts of idle people lead to a rise in crime, gang wars, public disruptions, increased taxes from law enforcement, imprisonment, welfare, accidents, etc.

So what is the solution? How do we deal with the growing number of idle people, many of whom will cause trouble? Can a nation really peacefully exist with only 1/3rd of the people working? Do we make "busy work" (like they do in Japan) or do we just drug them out (Europe)?

How do we deal with "Peak Idleness"?

[dolanbaker]

Short answer, work a three day week and two people become employed instead of one(job share). For this to work without impoverishing those who do the short hours, they would need to be paid the same amount as full time staff.
Doing something like this would also cut the social security payments as there will be far fewer unemployed.

[careinke]

Short answer, work a three day week and two people become employed instead of one(job share). For this to work without impoverishing those who do the short hours, they would need to be paid the same amount as full time staff.
Doing something like this would also cut the social security payments as there will be far fewer unemployed.

I'm confused, what do Social Security payments have to do with employment?

[Newfie]

C8, you have a good reason to worry.

This isn't the first time we've been here. The first time was mechanizing and fertilizing the farms. That left the majority of the population with nothing to do. For a while industrialization ate up that workforce, but even then jobs were hard to come by and wages low. The capitalist culture eventually gave way to the consumptive culture which feeds on the "service sector" AKA "welfare with dignity."

But that has not been without troubles, so we find the need to lock up many otherwise productive men, thereby creating jobs for guards, cleaners, constructors, lawyers, judges, therapist, etc.

I don't know where this will lead, but nowhere good.

[Shaved Monkey]

Doing something like this would also cut the social security payments as there will be far fewer unemployed.

I'm confused, what do Social Security payments have to do with employment?

In most 1 st world countries if you are unemployed the government gives you money usually every fortnight(the dole).
In most countries this is indefinite payment until you get a job, qualify for the aged pension or die.
More people employed means less government money needed to pay the dole and more people paying taxes.

[dolanbaker]

Doing something like this would also cut the social security payments as there will be far fewer unemployed.

I'm confused, what do Social Security payments have to do with employment?

In most 1 st world countries if you are unemployed the government gives you money usually every fortnight(the dole).
In most countries this is indefinite payment until you get a job, qualify for the aged pension or die.
More people employed means less government money needed to pay the dole and more people paying taxes.

and more people paying tax means (hopefully) a lower tax rate.

What really needs to change is the "work ethic" where people are expected to work so many hours a week and actually need to work such long hours(in a minimum wage job) to have a slightly better lifestyle than someone who is unemployed, or when quality of life is measured, workers are actually far worse off in this respect.

[radon1]

Before the industrial age, all the people on the planet were outside the scope of the industrial economy, as this economy did not exist. Once this economy emerged, more and more people were incorporated in it, with some of them later becoming "unemployed", or "idle", i.e. staying logistically within the scope of the industrial economy but not doing anything either inside or outside the scope of the industrial economy (nobody stopped them from leaving for the wilderness, but they normally didn't, surprise-surprise).

Historically, however, and even now, vast numbers of people has remained outside the scope of the industrial economy, living mostly in agrarian or wild areas of "developing" countries (well over half of the global population actually). Automation has been leading to incorporation of groups of these people into the industrial economy in a piecemeal manner. It could also lead to rise in unemployment among those already within the industrial economy, but the total number of people operating within the scope of industrial economy always necessarily grew as a result.

Therefore, the entire OP's argument setting up automation against overpopulation is totally flawed.

[Newfie]

Radon, I don't get your argument what so ever.

If you are expanding the discussion to the third would economies, maybe.

But I think C8's discussion was more about the mature, first world economies.

His general idea, that there are more workers than needed, and that we don't have a good way to deal with it has been long recognized. Here is an article by Bertrand Russel from 1932 on the topic.

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

[radon1]

But I think C8's discussion was more about the mature, first world economies.

What does "overpopulation" have to do with mature economies? What does "overpopulation" have to do with a bunch of troublemakers in mature economies? They (the troublemakers) can go for the simple subsistence living in the wild, as most of the third world people do - but they don't because they want this and that and that. They can travel to find a job in a location where automation outsourced them - but they don't because that's not what they wish for.

What do the wants and wishes of a bunch of troublemakers - solely a problem of these troublemakers - have to do with automation and "overpopulation"? Looks like an attempt to find a false culprit.

[Pops]

Dolan is right I think. The benefits of inovation (called "productivity" by capitalists who think it is their fault) need to be spread around.
Either that or bad things will likely happen.

Add in the fact mature economies are ... maturing.
Populations are aging and flatlining in many old economies and hopefully that spreads.

Used to be that new, cheap, young workers were required to do the unskilled and semi-skilled work. Now, we make our own appointments and our phones answer themselves and we have big machines do the labor for us... kids are a liability for the first time since agriculture.

Not a bad thing really.

[Outcast_Searcher]

So what is the solution? How do we deal with the growing number of idle people, many of whom will cause trouble? Can a nation really peacefully exist with only 1/3rd of the people working? Do we make "busy work" (like they do in Japan) or do we just drug them out (Europe)?

How do we deal with "Peak Idleness"?

Well, clearly not effectively in the US, based on what has happened so far. I'll talk about the US here, since there seems to be less of an organized support system than in (by far most) of the rest of the first world.

You could have a society with two major tiers, if automation takes over the bulk of the low skilled jobs. (At some point, the ones automation can't do become, relatively speaking, "skilled").

So one tier is basically on the dole. This system only provides a decent standard of living if all the automation can effectively run things for everyone who is living on the dole -- presumably ALL the low wage jobs since low wages are deemed "unfair" by much of society.

And the other tier is the worker class, the investor class, etc. who don't need the dole. (Perhaps one good thing to fall out of this in time COULD be the stark realization for everyone that education is truly very important, unless you want to accept the dole default).

So the key question in my mind is:

Now, what happens if the dole isn't high enough to be deemed "fair" by (likely, an ever growing, as automation improves) idle group who is completely dependent on it? If you tax businesses too highly and they can't compete globally, then they close down and you get NO taxes from them, and for all their workers who aren't financially independent, you get more idle people on the dole (assuming they can't find other jobs worth working at). Actually, given wealthy people's attitude toward "getting their social security" -- I suppose you get ALL the employees on the dole, whether they need it or not. (Sigh).

It could work, but I sense an AWFUL lot that could go wrong. The frequent hatred between the makers and the takers is likely a picnic now compared to what it could develop into.

I really like the job sharing idea. That is some sort of happy medium, at least as a stop gap. You also likely can find many more people willing to work roughly half time for more than the dole vs. full time -- assuming the income differential is decent to good, but not great.

Sadly, given the focus of the US electorate and politicians on short term knee jerk reactions to things, I don't see a smooth well planned reaction to this need for a different system, but more like chaos -- thus the ensuing mess is unlikely to be anywhere near ideally implemented.

Yuck. I hope I'm wrong but the transition doesn't look fun to me. And capitalists, I don't think that just leaving tens of millions of displaced unemployed people in coming years adrift to to be ignored is feasible, and I consider myself a capitalist BTW.

[Outcast_Searcher]

And automation has run its course, contrary to promise by Elon Tusk and Steve Jobs. The word processor and Excel spreadsheet long ago 'automated' office work just as the 6-axis industrial robot made short work of factory laborers. The only really revolutionary change has been automated chip/board fabrication which increased the availability of the first two automations.

Well pstarr, you can say that all you want. But the fact that automation continues and is replacing a LOT of the low skilled labor is a well documented fact, and is proceeding apace, whether you want to call it "revolutionary" or not. For example, the huge percentage of cashiers that have been replaced from the standardized automated checkout lines (with help from customers who don't like long lines) that have lost their jobs -- have still seen those jobs go away. And they're not coming back in any realistic scenario.

Consider the industries where a very few factories produce the entire global supply for widely consumed items. Examples: Hard disk drives and DVD players (now moving to B-D drives, of course).

Claiming that "automation has run its course" won't mean much to, for example, the huge numbers of fast food workers who lose their jobs to automation in coming years.

[dolanbaker]

The main point I think is that automation has reached (or is close to) the limits of financial viability, by that I mean there are a lot of low paid jobs that can only be automated with high cost and highly complex robots. These jobs can be automated, but never will, as it will always be cheaper to employ human automatons instead of robots.

[Pops]

Not just low skill, computers have replaced legal researchers—lawyers— in retrieving relevant material and are 95% accurate... They have replaced writers in churning out lots of boilerplate news stories that contain say, stock prices.

Intelligent systems can hold more accessible knowledge than a human and play what if millions of times faster (think playing chess only with medical symptoms), I always use my own graphic design where computation power decimated the ranks of skilled workers in the printing trades, the same in all "creative" fields.

It is a thing. We go pooh pooh and turn around and wonder why the working population ratio is falling or the disability ranks are rising or unattached workers and part timers and contract workers are increasing.

[Outcast_Searcher]

The main point I think is that automation has reached (or is close to) the limits of financial viability, by that I mean there are a lot of low paid jobs that can only be automated with high cost and highly complex robots. These jobs can be automated, but never will, as it will always be cheaper to employ human automatons instead of robots.

Without specifics, this isn't saying a lot -- since neither labor nor technology costs are fixed.

First, technology continues to drive down a lot of costs to do with electronics, which involve a lot of the components of the automation replacing the jobs (including robots and computers).

Second, part of what is driving the search for improved automation is the threat of higher labor costs for unskilled labor. It's delusional, for example, to deny that as minimum wage costs are driven much higher than the skills they pay for are worth in the marketplace (in many cases) by political forces -- that great incentives are created for businesses to replace (say $15 an hour) minimum wage labor to do the skill level equivalent of ask "Do you want fries with that?" -- plus a whole lot of other jobs. (This is true no matter how often those political forces chant words like "fairness" and "living wage".)

OTOH, getting a robot to crawl all around my house and accurately assess whether there is likely to be a termite problem -- I agree that job isn't likely to be replaced in the next decade, or even three. That's why this site has been discussing skills like plumbers and electricians perhaps being more valuable than a formal college education for a potentially easily replaced job in some fields.

[dolanbaker]

The other point about overdoing automation is the fact that ultimately salaried staff spend more than unemployed people.

[Newfie]

Yes Dolan and Pops, you guys get it, and C8 as well.

I don't think the other guys understand the topic. I've tried asking about this before here and elsewhere and it just goes nowhere. It seems to be a very difficult topic for most to wrap their heads around.