To have a smoother, less displacing transition into automation, you need to get rid of min wage and other labor laws. Ultimately, robots will reach a point and price that will render human labor obsolete. But the robots themselves need to be built and owned, as well as all the other economic resources. By abolishing IP and various other state supports and subsidies to the technocrats and big business (fiat money, infrastructure) it would decentralize the economy and ownership of the robots amongst the masses. We would all be investors and shareholders, reaping dividends off robot production, with some entrepreneurs, and AI taking the role of management
@@kathykelly5930 that's thankfully a falsifiable claim, if you look at industrial revolutions of the past the jobs in the new sector were numerous and somewhat similar in terms of skill level, But emerging sectors in the current industrial revolution offer far fewer jobs and have huge differences in terms of skill level in comparison to the jobs they displaced. (Compare employment opportunities offered by Ford during the t20 era vs Google right now) It's always good to remember that the market has a track record of _never_ catering to individuals that do not offer productivity to the market. The proportion of humans that offer subsistence level productivity is getting smaller.
@@havenotchosenyet Your last statement is true because the population is older than ever and we are having less kids, so yes a larger percentage of the population can't produce now more than ever because of age. But we have unemployment rates now lower than in the 60's with way more automation in that time span. Automation is just a tool, a tool eliminates certain aspects of work but opens up new ones as well.
@@kathykelly5930 this old dumb argument that there will always be human labor needed. It's completely false when a machine can do a better job than a hundred workers because of efficiency. Thats a hundred jobs gone and replaced by machines and, as population increases, it will present and even bigger problem. Equal number for jobs for humans and machines is unrealistic.
@@lynnpabontheelitehero6579 if you don't move you'll atrophy to death, therefor people will be incentivized to not go to the gym and instead do something more meaningful....that meaningful action is subject to one's knowledge and skills
Before industrialization people were saying the same thing... Look how advanced and better off literally every single human being is now. 90%+ of the population used to be in agriculture and now the it's below 5%. Society has gotten better. Automation will be another great leap for mankind.
I’m not sure of how big of a problem automation will be, but I am fairly confident that most left wing policies to solve this problem will likely make it worse.
@Jacke DenFria it's been a while since have been on this channel . I forgot that this channel is bias and supports libertarian ideology. I will not comment again. That answer all my questions. Your beliefs are no govt and big businesses flourish. I rather not debate with you.
@Jacke DenFria Not having IP protections would hinder innovation massively. Why would anyone put all that effort and capital into creating a product or service while it's ok for the bloke down the road to just copy and try sell for himself. Alot more people take the entrepreneur risk when they know there product is going to be protected. That's why there alot more innovations and inventions in Western countries where there are IP protections than others.
The argument against automation taking jobs having the solution being that people will just be happy making stuff is weak and erases the fact that work doesnt make us human.
Laying around on the couch all day watching tv does not make us human either. Life does not seem too dignified right now for those spending their time waiting for the welfare check to show up. I shudder to think of a society where that is the norm.
@@samratpaul25 There is wisdom in the bible verse that says "by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread". Human nature has not changed in the entire span of recorded history. Our technology does. Too many people lack the wisdom to see the ills we keep on producing year after year when we step all over ancient wisdom. There are some people that will convert free time into beneficial things for the rest of humanity, but far too many that will do little of value when there is no need to work. The evidence is all around us. I have been alive long enough to start seeing this downhill pattern first-hand.
@@clumsyclicker3199 whether or not you believe in the bible is meaningless. The point is that the bible, among other great works of literature is saying something true about human nature. In this case that a person should work for what they want or need. I agree that we could work for fewer hours per day and maintain a standard of living equivalent to sometime in the past, but that too does not matter much in this context. The fact remains that human wants seem to be boundless. We always want more. But also, there are some people who are willing to work for what they want and others who will sit around and wait for someone else to do the work. Any system that rewards the lazy will grow the ranks of the lazy.
Yeah deflation wasn't the cause of great depression, it was the cure. Things got over valued, people ran out of money, the economy crashed, things got cheaper, economy started rolling again. It was restructuring the unsustainable economy.
It's not about the number of jobs Automation can create. It's about the aging workforce that can not and will not be moved or retrained for those roles. New startups are disrupting all kinds of industries so its' also not about concentrating wealth towards one group. Wealth will move all over the place. Kids growing up and the H1B of bringing other countries workforces here will fill these new jobs. He misses two things.. 1. This workforce isn't prepared for the next workforce that is needed. 2. Automation isn't just robots. An accounting department of years ago 50 is now down to 10. Agencies, Companies etc find ways to remove overhead: People. They cost the most and are the most problematic. We need to prepare and promote and more entrepreneurial workforce for people to generate their own income instead of being left to filling low skilled positions that aren't easily replaced by automation or software tools.
Robots won't, but the minimum wage will. Just because the minimum wage is x dollars per hour doesn't mean someone can afford to pay it. I work for minimum wage, and I still think it should be lower.
+psy. FFS, dont talk about economic questions when you clearly dont understand how the economy works. "Afford to pay" argument is like someone arguing a square wheel will work better. Its fucking clueless!!!
@@psyxypher3881 The libertarian audience has started to reinforce their own ideas among themselves, this is not a good sign; all models are wrong, some are useful. The automation claim is simple: 1. Humans have only 2 things to offer in terms of productive potential: physical and cognitive labour. 2. _ALL_ physical labour has been automated, so people moved to cognitive tasks like gardening and scientific research. (Notice gardening is under cognitive labour, the component of gardening that is yet to be automated is the cognitive component, the physical component of that job can be done for less than a cent an hour. 3. Computers start to automate cognitive tasks too, so people start to move from low degree of freedom tasks to higher degrees of freedom. (DOF has nothing to do with what people find difficult ex: multiplying two million digit numbers has a lower degree of freedom than recognizing a cat in an image) 4. Humans have a limited number of DOF to offer, there is nothing to say that AI will stop before that limit, more likely it will proceed way beyond that. 5. Unemployment will become a problem waaay before the scenario in (4.) We have to remember that during previous automation waves there were mass riots and a lot of suicides. 6. *And this is the most important point, the market has a track record of **_never_** catering to people without productive potential* . Thus UBI, or at the very least we better start experimenting with alternative economic models till we find something that is resilient to large portions of the population being _unemployable_ The world is changing our economic models need to keep up, there is no end of history, fukuyama was wrong
The main reason that artificial intelligence (AI) will take far more jobs than other technology is "human intuition". In almost every job, things go wrong, and the worker must find a creative way to fix the problem (like fixing a machine, cleaning up a mess, etc.). Because of this, an actual person was required for many jobs, even jobs that could be mostly automated. AI specifically seeks to exhibit human intuition, and in many ways AI has been successful at this. When robots can handle messy situations, then human workers will really be unnecessary.
Regulations do not exist in a vacuum. They exist for a reason and Serv a purpose. You breath clean air and drink safe water because industrialist were forbidden from polluting them in their persuit of profits at any cost. You did not live in a time before regulations so you don't know what it was like to have to work for employers who could not be bother to take your safety into account because doing so would mean extra cost at the expense of their sacred bottom line. But hey it's cool.
abram galler He's not, he's speaking sense, after the industrial revolution Thames vecame so poluted that the empire started putting those regulations in place at least in London, and with the polution fines they financed new embakments on the river to make it faster so that it would stench less. If not for regulation all those 10% of people in US between 25 and 55 who can't work in today's society would starve to death. so... think about that
Many people seem to think that automation is going to suddenly appear and half the world's population will lose their jobs in one day. That's how people who are against automation and want to heavily regulate it think. But that's ridiculous. Fully autonomous automation is first going to happen in places that are already almost fully automatized and it will happen in select few countries and companies at first, not fully, not everywhere. It could take a decade or more for just a single job to become nearly fully automated from the point when automatization of said job starts. Said people will need to look for work in other companies and other position, but they'll have *years* to prepare for that for sure. Many low-skilled and low-paying jobs won't get automated for a long time because humans will still be more reliable and adapt better to various potentially dangerous situations, while machines are expensive and complex and don't adapt to major changes very well. So, no one will be jobless? No, of course not, tons of people will lose their current jobs but a majority will quickly find other jobs. And EVERYONE will be better off because things will get cheaper and safer.
So, to sum up your dumbass comment, it's: "it's going to happen but it just won't happen anytime soon, so it's okay . Let the people in the future worry about it". Got it. You're a fucking moron
Martin got demolished. But what's scarier is the comments on here who are on his side, and who address none of Antony's points anyway. And yes there is kind of an economic law that proves automation can't end up with mass poverty. Antony said what it was. As prices plummet, work becomes obsolete. You don't NEED to work. Martin is worried about the possibility of huge factories making millions of widgets for no one, a thing that could never happen.
@@MBarberfan4life Well most charitable explanation I can have of this is that Martin thought the dropping prices in the question would be caused by deflation, which is what he says is bad, and not automation. No idea why he'd think that in this context but at least that makes more sense than thinking falling prices are bad, which obviously no one thinks is true.
This is a problem I find on the internet and even in person. People just come with what they have to say and never actually say why what I have said is wrong! Check out my debate with Richard Wolff for more of the same.
@@poxpower do you think the government (and banks) would allow a deflating GDP? I'm all for going back to a gold standard, so that we can actually have deflation. But, we don't, so maybe austrians should stop talking about rainbows and unicorns.
Fair point. But, the real question is whom do you believe is better suited to determining what new employment the truck driver should seek? Government policies will necessarily limit options for the truck driver through licensing and other restrictions. A competitive market maximizes the available choices for those who need those alternatives most desperately. Is it better to have a displaced trucker who chooses not to become a Spanish guitarists, or one who cannot become one because it's illegal?
@@aaronchapin9331 A UBI (Freedom Dividend) does not limit the way a citizen spends the money. I agree that government funded retraining programs don't work. I predict that there pace of change will be faster in this industrial revolution and people won't have the time to retrain even if they live near an appropriate school.
I'm all for automation. I think in the long run it will cause price decreases, increase vacation time and weekend to 3 days, and reduce normal work day to 6 hours or less. But we are in the beginning of a major transition period and it will go on for a few more decades. We need to figure out how to manage this transition without causing mass unemployment and social unrest.
That also reduces your pay to half as much as use to be. Why do you works so many hours? to get more pay. You work half as many hours and suddenly half your income is gone, not much of a shocker. On top of this jobs will get more competitive as more workers will apply to a shrinking amount of jobs making labor conditions and pay even worse on top of your lower hours. Life satisfaction is going to decline dramatically.
The thing is, wealth isn't created to not be consumed. With automation creating unlimited supply, prices would approach zero (prices=supply/demand, limit(supply->0)=0). This would absolutely, undeniably, break our economy. Only a few sectors would be spared, namely land and natural resources, and with the latter it's only a matter of time until we start mining asteroids. In other words, even if half of the population gets fired, there will be more wealth left for the other half to ever be consumed. This wealth is destined to be distributed somehow, in some ways we can't even imagine yet. I bet on new age charities to lead this effort (more resembling factory owners just giving away stuff to the local community than actually organised charities), but again, we can't possibly imagine it yet
I keep thinking that the reason UBI is being discussed more and more over the last 5 years is that the power structure is preparing the masses for earning far less money.
@@kathykelly5930 I think that's generally true. If unemployment is incentivized, more unemployment is what we should expect. However, I'd support UBI in the form of a negative income tax which replaced *all* other entitlement programs. It's always a case of tradeoffs, which can make even the most extreme proposals reasonable by contrast.
@@kathykelly5930 Wrong. He does not stack it with things like SNAPS or other cash-like programs. He only stacks it with Social Security (which is your right to keep after paying into it for decades), SSDI (disability that you can only get if you have worked at some point in your life), and things like housing assistance. I encourage you to dig into it more, and not just listen to biased outlets that want you to believe Andrew is some kind of hardcore socialist.
@@darthclide nope, go to his website, last I checked its on top of everything else. The SS trust is dry, before the end of every year they have to borrow from other programs, it is not solvent.
"where the truck drivers live", umm you mean in the major cities? Most trucking jobs are in the metropolitan areas so I'm not sure why he thinks truckers all live in the countryside. I am one of those truckers that will be displaced, and I'm looking forward to driving not being a required use of human capital. I love to drive, but the long demanding hours and seditary nature of the job are not a good fit for the human body and causes many otherwise preventable medical issues.
Humanity was terrified that automation/mechanization would cause huge unemployment over a century ago. And look at our unemployment rate now? It was all silly blather. Robotics will make are lives FAR better and humanity will find other - more productive - things to work at. I welcome robotics and automation. Besides, what is the alternative? Stop innovating? Stop inventing? That is ridiculous.
Our labor force participation rate is abysmal. Our underemployment rate is abysmal. Our life expectancy has dropped for 3 years in a row (suicide rate is a big contributor to this). The list goes on and on, but I encourage you to look up what Trump was saying in 2016. *Hint* He was saying the unemployment rate is a bogus number. So why did 20% of Americans believe him then, but now they worship that number in 2020 when he says our country is doing great?
@@darthclide 1) You do realize that the LFPR is FAR better then it was 50 years ago. And mechanization has greatly increased in that time. So your argument there means nothing. 2) The U-3 is under 4%. So your argument there is nothing. 3) And Trump called it a 'hoax' - not 'bogus'. And I agree with him. But even looking at the U-6 or the employment-population ratio. There is ZERO evidence that mechanization has done anything bad to the employed in America.
@@McRocket "U3 is the rate of unemployment released each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), but many economists view the U-6 rate as the more meaningful rate because it covers a larger percentage of people who are unemployed." Nice try. Thousands of economists are warning about the next industrial revolution. And I would love to see you walk up to the store clerks who lost their job to self-checkout and say "ZERO EVIDENCE". Among the myriad of others who have lost their jobs and are now suffering because they don't have the skill to become a programmer or IT technician. Also, what does it matter what our labor force participation rate was 50 years ago other than stroking our egos and saying "my, look how far we have come"?, if it still means many Americans are still without work. All the numbers show that this is the worst time to undergo the 4th industrial revolution. And yet people like you act as if this transition will be a peaceful walk in the park with no tears or bloodshed. Or let me guess... You think that most of these shootings come from truly racist people, and that it has nothing to do with economic insecurity? And nice job moving the goalposts with Trump. He specifically said that the underemployment rate did not represent the true pain Americans are facing. And yet now he is proudly proclaiming what a great economy he has created, based primarily on those supposed "fake" unemployment numbers.
@@darthclide 1) Show me a list from an unbiased source of these ''thousands of economists are warning about the next industrial revolution.'? 2) So show me a link to unbiased, factual proof that robotics will increase unemployment when history shows us that mechanization did not increase unemployment one, little bit? You have ZERO unbiased, factual proof that robotics will raise unemployment at all.
Simple answer...YES...even robots will build robots. Programs will write themselves. All jobs will become obsolete if general AI becomes a reality. However, this automation will produce abundance and the economy can shift to a different means of exchange beyond our current conception of how an economy should look.
Worst case scenario, humans will create a parallel economic market whit their on cripto currency. They will make things by hand, sell food planted by them. it will be a primitive way of living. And you will have the official economic market just run by robots and a few very reach healthy people.
@@alexandrelobo8524, I'm not sure that makes sense unless it's an intentional movement like the Amish. General AI would essentially be a sustainable variant of a "UBI."
@@alexandrelobo8524, that's reductive. Why would they need to have a job if an AI does it better? The paradigm of having a job relies on the principle of acquisition of scarce resources. General AI would provide sufficient resources to sustain existence. There would be a paradigm shift in what is needed to be done (i.e. to get food, etc.) vs what can be done when these basic necessities are abundant and readily consumable.
Having prices go down 70% while wages go down 20% is called an "increase in buyer power" or "increase in the value of a dollar", which is how the middle class got invented. That's not a depression; dont fight it
The tractor replaced the horse, not the farmer. Look at what the technology actually does. Does the technology aid in the physical labor? Or does the technology outright do your job. Artificial Intelligence is meant to replace real intelligence.
Johan R are u joking? We should embrace automation and give people a financial/health safety net that allows them to live a dignified life without selling their labor
@@nickcherries I don't know about you, but I personally think that working for $7 an hour is better than not working at all. And the increases in minimum wage are making it is cheaper to use robots instead of people. Second, selling your labor is a part of life. Scarcity is a reality. And more importantly *labor is a commodity*. The minimum wage doesn't benefit workers; it is a violation of their right to work for less than minimum wage. If I want to work for $3 an hour, why is the government allowed to stop me? You might say that companies would exploit workers, but I don't think about big companies like Amazon, but Joe Sandwich Guy running a food truck and his nephew who needs a job and job experience. Joe can't afford to pay minimum wage, despite the fact that his nephew would gladly work for less.
I don't think demand is infinite. Our time and attention as consumers are also scarce. As automation concentrates market share into the hands of companies like Disney and Netflix that have the budgets to advertise and grab attention, smaller businesses will be outcompeted. The product of which is a winner take all economy. UBI will at least provide people enough means to live and participate in such an economy.
Remember the ATM? We were told it would put all bank tellers out of work. We still have Tellers, but we also have ATM designers, manufacturers, servicers, programmers, etcetera. This may mean that a person would have to switch vocations or learn a new skill first. I have had to learn a new skill and find a new job in a different area multiple times, it is not hard. As long as you don't create SkyNet or some other DoomsDay device...
It's not hard for certain people with the intelligence or flexibility needed to make such a transition. But I'm confident that huge swaths of the population will not be able to make a transition to meaningful work.
@@spiffygonzales5899 The government can't control it, Yang will tie UBI to inflation and everyone gets it. No politician is going to remove it unless they want massive public backlash. You can also choose to not put in UBI and watch everything crumble, I bet the government will respond well to that.
2 points. First, I wish Antony framed the debate better. Because if this was just an interesting academic question, there's certainly some probability that what Martin say may happen. But the problem is, that this is not an academic question only. People that are for affirmative argue what they argue, because they want to introduce massive interférences into economy that should protect us against this supposed problem. And the evidence bar for that should be significantly higher then what they present. As usual, they focus only on their perceived problem and completely discard the potential massive downsides their policy prescriptions may create. And second, I wish someone finally dealt with the deflation argument. It's 100% a straw man. I understand how it's supposed to work on macro level, but did anyone did reality check? Do you really think that in normal world people will not purchase a car, a house, a washing machine if they need it, just because it may be 2% cheaper next year? Time preference beats deflation almost every time. It's mind boggling that hundred years after Bohm-Bawerk people still completely forget that there's something like a time preference. Of course, there's one exception to that - indeed, companies may postpone their capital investment, if they believe that someone like a CENTRAL BANK will print a bunch of money and make their debts cheaper. Indeed. But alas, here we have the self-fulfilling prophecy in all it's beauty.
@56:51 how does paying someone the UBI poverty wage of $12k a year give them a purpose? How does this subsidy not contribute to the same "poverty trap" dependency of traditional welfare? What would inspire an 18 year old with no job and 2 roommates to play video games for life with a combined UBI income of $36k? You expect people to work for purpose instead of drugs/sex?
Yes. In the same way that the machine gun would definitely end war. Nobody would continue fighting with such dangerous weapons. This time it is totally different than the past. Really.
+Chad. Humanity has had "robot" economy before actually... The Romans, for example, had it, but it wasnt robots. It was slaves. In turn MOST Roman citizens lived in squalor, the economy was small and the rich were very rich and owned everything with very little upwards mobility for everybody else. I mean, the US fought a civil war over the negatives of a "robot economy" (slaves undercutting competition in none slave states and in turn also limiting citizen buying power via less jobs and more competition for those jobs etc).
Lobos222 this is well put. I would add that policies like UBI that put cash in the hands of people actually increases this. People give the money to Amazon and now the big corps can afford to build better robots.
The elephant in the room in this debate was AI - Artificial Intelligence - which no-one mentioned or discussed. They are rehashing old arguments about "robotics" - which have replaced manual workers. AI will have the potential to replace professions, not just task based employment. In other words, lawyers, doctors, accountants, architects. Shame the debaters missed this.
With the abundance that comes from AI doing most of the work the biggest problem I see is people having a lot of time on their hands and not knowing what to do with themselves. I know that people who are creative will be happiest and those who can teach skills will too. We all need a purpose and I see a positive view of the future where we will have the freedom to indulge in what we are interested in like rich people have always been able to do.
Worst case scenario, humans will create a parallel economic market whit their on cripto currency. They will make things by hand, sell food planted by them. it will be a primitive way of living. Working on a job will very dificult because machines will have all the job vacancies. People will not have any money And you will have the official economic market just run by robots and a few very reach healthy people.
My thoughts prior to the debate: Yes, at first, but it will help more people in the long run (just like any other invention that has put people out of a job at the moment of implementation).
Mr. Ford unfortunately doesn't understand the difference between economic expansion (aggregate supply grows faster than demand) and contraction (demand falls faster than supply). Both have a general fall in prices. The latter characterizes recessions and widespread default, while the former characterizes prosperity and natural credit expansion. This former has indeed happened historically with falling prices, most notably in the US during the incorrectly named "long depression" (yes, Mr. Ford has not been the only scholar to make this rather dramatic error). He makes some useful points, but this big error does taint his understanding of the macroeconomic effects of disruptive innovation. He should confine his predictions to short term effects.
If it was that simple. Wages would be up, in buying power context, not down. Like they are in the US... There wont be any "Spanish guitarist" latte if you have to compete with 1 million workers to get that single paying job a Ai or robot hasnt taken.
No, of course it won’t just like it has not done so thus far. This is the debate which Andrew Yang initially said he would do in the affirmative before backing out.
What is missed by many is that the past revolutions created more effective tools. But what is coming isn't more effective tools. The coming revolution will create WORKERS. The automation will be able to completely displace a good fraction of the work force. We are at the very start of a revolution in how business of many types is conducted.
Really this is just the continuation and inevitable outcome of the industrial revolution. At first you are only capable of enhancing the performance of the workers, but over time you improve it little by little until the tool you started with that helped the worker is capable of replacing the worker.
The big points, imo, on this general subject are... ...unemployment statistics aren't impressive. I'm unemployed, but because I do not qualify for unemployment I am not counted in those statistics. All you have to do is narrow the scope and you can make statistics say whatever you want, and make whatever point you want to make. ...businesses need customers, the consumer class is not in much danger here no matter what happens. The goal should be to reduce suffering, not to prevent disaster. ...not everybody will be suited for the jobs the future needs, you can't just re-educate somebody and expect them to keep up, you can't just tell somebody to "learn to code" and expect any results. ...automation is here already, it's a gradual process. Have you seen the new mcdonalds screens? Have you seen walmarts self checkout lanes? More and more, and faster than we think, people ARE losing jobs to automation, it's just misleading to say that they're "losing jobs" when it's more a case of reduced hiring. AI is also here already, it monitors temps, learns their jobs, and then the temps are let go so the AI can do it. This is happening, right now. (and others I may be forgetting right now) In my opinion, rising technology is to blame 100% for government failing to ruin absolutely everybodies lives. It's just too powerful a force for good. I honestly don't care who wins elections, because all parties are technophobic in one way or another, I only care that technology continues to advance despite them. A UBI seems like a fantastic idea to me, it would ease the most suffering and promote the most advancement, as well as accidentally solve a lot of other problems (homelessness, chronic unemployability, illegal immigration) but I'm uncertain if our economy and technology are yet powerful enough to support it. Someday, maybe not today, but someday.
You're right, there isn't a fundamental law that prevents technological unemployment. What you have to argue tough, is it good or bad? Let's take the radiologist example. 100k radiologist will likely soon go unemployed, the whole branch of employment will grow obsolete with a single piece of image reading program. Sucks to be radiologist. So what does the radiologist does? He goes on to become a nurse or a doctor of somekind. That means, across a period of time, we got 100k more doctors and nurses, without increasing the overall labour cost of the healthcare sector. Technology makes things cheaper. And that's good for us.
I'm going to guess that a lot of those radiologists are not going to make great doctors and nurses. Radiologists might choose their profession based in part on not having the desire or ability to interact with the patient as much as needed to be a doctor or nurse.
@@mikebetts2046 That's fine. Either way, we, the patients, would save not having to pay the 100k radiologist wages. Cheaper healthcare. Nevertheless, we would get 0-100k more doctors. Instead of us paying the radiologist wages, we would get a bigger chance to pay the doctors or nurses appointments wages. Deflation.
Almost 90% of jobs were replaced within a generation by machines in the 1900's... (and it didn't cause 90% unemployment then) Economics just boils down to how much energy you have to put out vs how much you can earn for it. You can express this in Calories: 8 hours of unskilled labor cost you about 2,500 Calories (upper case 'C' aka "Food calories" or Kilocalories).... >In 1800, the money earned could only buy, at most 2500 Cal in other labor. >But in 2020, you can buy *at least* 1,116,000 Calories in the form of gasoline. ....granted, much of that benefit is lost in the conversion to goods due to regulatory redundancy), but the production of many many many goods is unaffected by this cheap energy....and that is what automation will improve, from a "whole picture perspective" Automation will just mean shorter work weeks for those who want that, as things will cost so much less, and equally more wealth for those who don't. Most future jobs will be more human-interaction based, also. Service industry, etc... you'll see alot more life coaches I'll bet, for example ..
Facinating discussion. Thank you Reason TV! Silly doom and gloom from the 'Yes' side. Reminded me very much of the rhetoric over climate alarmism and that there's a crisis so we need to act, which obviously means more taxes and more gov interference in the economy in some way which absolutely WILL affect the economy negatively and cause more unemployment.
Jon Haugan do you want me to say reader, when all people are writting nowadays is just crap made to sell, when books are rated by their sales numbers. When the most bought book segment in US is self improvement, and most of those books are just crap, pure crap, made to pray on the most vulnerable, who are searching for a way to improvement. Novel industry is dead in terms of the value that modern novels will hold in literature when we look back 100 yrs from now. Do you think people are going to study the meaning and ideas explored in "50 shades of grey"?
@@Victor-my1hi You are assuming that my work is anything like 50 Shades. It's not, I assure you. And I was pointing out that you misspelled the word consumer. Not CONSUMMER. Secondly, if you were trying to troll me I would give you the friendly advice to learn how to spell properly in these forums. It doesn't look good to try to jab at someone's intellect or intellectual abilities online if you can't spell, punctuate, or use proper grammar.
Not as long as government is forcing inflation down our throats. It's government literal stated goal. Destroy the purchasing power of the money, a bit at a time, to force us to buy stuff we don't really need today, because we won't afford it tomorrow.
It’s also about the timing. Previous Industrial Revolutions took place over decades or even a century-plus. AI is advancing at a MUCH more rapid pace and the rate of adoption of new technology has been on the rise. Look at how long it took to get a refrigerator into the majority of US houses versus how long to sell 200,000,000 smart phones.
Worst case scenario, humans will create a parallel economic market whit their on cripto currency. They will make things by hand, sell food planted by them. it will be a primitive way of living. And you will have the official economic market just run by robots and a few very reach healthy people.
Government spends $100 billion/yr fighting a war against people who do the wrong drugs; Now what exactly are you inferring when you state that using an illegal drug is negatively correlated with holding a job?
If you think automation is going to take jobs, then you clearly have not worked in a warehouse. You know what came before forklifts and pallet jacks? By hand. All automation machines we have break down, so our MECHANICS WORK on a daily basis fixing them. No one will have driverless semis because of the nuances that come with being a truck driver: upkeep, security and handling of the load. Not to mention the paperwork the driver has to sign. Im remember people talking about automation taking jobs, ten years ago. If its such a rapid pace of automation that we cant keep up, where is it? I still have a job at a warehouse. Or are you just scaring the public with your false revelations?
"Can you put a truck driver to take care of the elderly? No." Why not? The whole problem is that central banks are not allowing prices to come down as productivity goes up. Of course things look dire when prices which should be going down are being "artificially" being brought up. If prices were allowed to come down, people could accept works that receive fewer units of dollars, but maintain their standard of living. In fact, some of those might, as one of the speakers mentions, voluntarily reduce their work hours, which would also help increasing demand for work. Then again, there's a problem with Education, which didn't really update to form people with the adequate mind for a society in the information age. Productive people in the new age, are those that never stop learning. As times goes on, more and more will be demanded cognitively from agents, but that's a trend that's been happening up until now as well.
People don't know this, but in the 19th century wages went down overall, but prices fell even further. If you just left your money in your mattress it would gain value. A slow deflationary economy means booming wealth, a slowly inflationary economy means a slow quiet death.
You're right, there isn't a fundamental law that prevents technological unemployment. What you have to argue tough, is it good or bad? Let's take the radiologist example. 100k radiologist will likely soon go unemployed, the whole branch of employment will grow obsolete with a single piece of image reading program. Sucks to be radiologist. So what does the radiologist does? He goes on to become a nurse or a doctor of somekind. That means, across a period of time, we got 100k more doctors and nurses, without increasing the overall labour cost of the healthcare sector. Technology makes things cheaper. And that's good for us.
Nevertheless, its adoption in the United States (as with universal healthcare) occurred later than most other countries. Switzerland, for example, conducted a popular referendum on UBI as early as 2016,* with a proposed amount of $2,800/month. Meanwhile, a small-scale pilot project in Namibia during 2004 cut poverty from 76% to 37%, boosted education and health, increased non-subsidised incomes, and cut crime.* An experiment involving 6,000 people in India had similar success.* In the short to medium term, rising unemployment was highly disruptive and triggered an unprecedented crisis.* For the US, in particular, it led to some of the biggest economic reforms in modern history.* In the longer term, however, it was arguably a positive development for humanity.* UBI acted as a temporary bridge or stepping stone to a post-scarcity world, with even greater advances in robotics and automation occurring in the late 21st century and beyond.**
And perhaps you could teach art to those who want to learn too. I truly see this happening in the future as people will have so much more time to enjoy doing things they want to do.😊
This time we're not just coming up with a better tool. It's not a cotton gin or assembly line or an agricultural combine that is being invented. We're creating the workers themselves. We won't be displacing workers to some other industry - we're replacing the workers in every industry.
obviously it will, but then that creates new opportunities and jobs that don't even exist. Some of the most common jobs today didn't exist 10-20 years ago.
@@BrianRGioia Automation has already destroyed jobs for low income ppl for hundreds of years, but it creates new opportunities that you could never predict.
@@BrianRGioia IQ is a shit statistic that doesnt have to be a limiting factor to most, just put some more effort into school and have a half decent education system and anybody can get a degree. There is also service jobs like retail that are very unlikley to be automated and dont require a complex degree
@@BrianRGioia There are almost no domestic workers anymore but most of that work is just not getting done, and is difficult and expensive to automate. I would really like a servant that can do stuff naked.
45:00 "If prices fall as result of automation, this deflation will make people unable to pay their debts" Um, this isn't deflation, this is prices falling because the cost to produce said products or services have fallen. So the purchasing power of money is the same, this is just the value of the goods and services made by *automation specifically* that are falling Silly libs. This is also the guy saying ubi is a good idea, despite the prices of goods and services going up proportionately. These are two accounts of his confusion of price dynamics
"So the purchasing power of money is the same, this is just the value of the goods and services made by automation specifically that are falling." Hmm... no. The purchasing power of money is defined as the array of prices of goods that a monetary unit can buy. So if some prices fall, the purchasing power of money has increased. Vice versa for rising prices. In other words, the purchasing power of money is determined, among others, by the general amount of goods, so if the supply of some goods rises due to technological progress, the purchasing power of money goes up.
@@ohad157 But your purchasing power goes down if your employment or pay does. If the price of goods and services is going down about proportionally at about the same time, this is not as big of a deal.
@@juanfernandez1696 where did i say wolf ... and btw metaphors always have partial match ... more importantly it will be to address my economic argument ... as long as we have partialy free market there will always be new jobs because infinite needs beget new products i.e. new companies and new jobs.
@@TheMraptor their will be jobs and even new jobs but will their be enough jobs for the populace ?. I have doubts because this time really is different.
@@juanfernandez1696 ai is nowhere near displacing labor in fact there will be more opportunity for low skill laborers to babysit ai .. there is more types of jobs now than ten years ago ... i know cause thats what i do ... ai systems are like a human savant moron which can be fooled by even slight change in input..
you meant to tell me that people that don't go into engineering, computer science, mechanics etc, but instead take a few liberal arts courses and just become leftist politicians, can't accurately predict how automation will affect the market? I do like his human approach to capitalism, everyone wants to be the powerhouse libertarian, but we need more of these guys.
You can learn a new skill on the job pretty fast.... just take away bullshit certifications, and burdensome regulations and people will learn fast. Spend 8 hours a day doing anything and you get it pretty fast... Also Cryptocurrency KIN is now paying people for completing online tasks.... so there is another avenue for value distribution
So if robots take over construction for example and building a new skyscraper cost half lol what do you think will happen? will be an insane boom in new construction and more jobs are created, people always want more!!!
it would be a waste too if there are no people to lease or buy property too. i would think robots would help lower costs all around, looking forward for house build robots especially in california which would cut costs dramatically, imagine? no need to worry about paying for healthcare or any benefits that you would normally have to spend for a human employee?
@@spiffygonzales5899 you don't get it? If you need now 10 people to build a house and you would need 5 with robots, you would build many more homes, and eventually need even more employees, take for example automation we have now in laundry, making cars, clothes, we buy many more cars now, and look how many clothes people buy now compared to a hundred years ago, it's unnecessary alarmism, cheaper prices always leads to people buying more and creating more jobs...
That would be true if we still had population growth. Birth rates have been decreasing so unless we only have large cities and no longer rural areas then it could make sense.
A job that faces the same challenges? A job that someone can study the history of and then do? Bruh, you just described all jobs including your own. There isn't a single job on the planet that faces new and different challenges every single day, and which creates a job history so varied that no one could learn to do it. Such a job could never exist in a division of labor workforce.
In the US, I honestly do not see a 3 day weekend. I notice people working a lot, like more than 40 hours a week. Are we richer 🤔 I don’t feel people are richer. Car prices, home cost, and food costs haven’t gone down from my observation. Where is Antony getting his examples from? I suppose the rate of income isn’t keeping up with the rate of expenses 🤔
The affirmative guy sounds like a reasonable guy - there will be challenges, it's not all bad, there is a definite lag between layoffs and retraining, people need purpose, capital is more important than labour than it has ever been, markets can help but are not the solution to everything. The Scottish guy is just a rambling, garbled, deluded mess.
Who cares about "employment". If technology frees more people to live the life of a simple homesteader I'm all for it! Who needs grocery stores and trucking when you can pick a fruit off your own tree
89% of men involved in the workforce, ever stop to think that the change down from 97% is at least in part do to it becoming socially acceptable for men to be homemakers? You also have people retiring while in their prime, that's not something that used to happen.
Only 6% of Men are stay-at-home workers. Thus the unemployment rate for men has increased 5% www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/24/stay-at-home-moms-and-dads-account-for-about-one-in-five-u-s-parents/#:~:text=The%20stay%2Dat%2Dhome%20share,about%20a%20quarter%2Dcentury%20earlier.
Robots are not the cause of unemployment. Constantly increasing the federal and state minimum wage is what causes unemployment. Low skill workers are pushed out of the market.
I don't know surely the lower paid jobs will be easily done with robots and AI but servicing said robots will become more important, and that education should be very mainstream and offer many jobs certainly lower than they'll take away but more in design and concept for the next generation of robots and on and on, there should always be an influx of jobs of engineers who want to maint and design robots, and they were always be a niche for cooking/service/customer service that a couple of humans can get into because it'll be different. But many more people will need to learn better skills and we have to start teaching them, this problem is worst in locations where schooling is already dogshit because robots will take those jobs and they'll have nothing its important that in replacing these jobs the level of skill of humanity goes up alongside it, nobody who doesn't want to needs to be a fry cook anymore but like wise they'll need to be decent at robot maint or some other specialist field, and it'll certainly help in professions where nurses are used for human resource issues moving people around and making sure tasks are being completed when the robots can fill those odd jobs the nurses will be left to focus on their skills treating people, like wise teaching will become more important and its really strange we haven't made it more important. Teaching the next generation is the most important thing we can do and we leave it to radical commies who don't bother to read history and people who only settle for the job? its a really horrid system we have that needs to be pushed up.. it needs to be an honor to teach it needs to pay better and the odd job bullshit needs to be taken away so teachers can focus on making sure students learn what they are required/want to.
What you are missing is that it will be AI that is designing and maintaining those robots. That is the whole point. Eventually AI and robotics will get to the point where they will be every bit as capable as humans at everything. What do we do then?
Automation takes jobs, but it also creates jobs. People saw this during the industrial revolution of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In that period, western civilizations got thoroughly changed and reworked so that it resembled today's society, albeit with less advanced technology. People who used to work outside in the fields now worked inside factories. Sure there was mass unemployment, but it didn't last long. This transformation of western societies from backwards agrarian systems with literally medieval technology into advanced industrial ones with lots of mod cons lead to vast improvements in people's lives. Now, someone in the lower middle class in a developed country has more comforts and lives longer than the average ancient emporer or medieval monarch! An artificial intelligence singularity would have a similar effect. It would result in a better situation than during the original industrial revolution. Radical life extension or even immortality of some kind, great civilian access to outer space, space colonization, etc, all may come true with AI.
A life without meaningful work is a life without meaning and dignity. What is sad, and Jordan Peterson speaks on this a lot. That the portion of the population with low IQs will struggle to find work in the future. I do not believe that taking taxing companies (which is impossible, companies don't pay any tax. The end user does.) and handing out cash monthly to people is the solution. I do think there will always be a market demand for human service, and human made products. Two examples, I don't want to spend 100 bucks on dinner to have it made and served by a robot (personally I hate those little tablets you find on a lot of the tables of chain restaurants, they have no place on a dining room table.). If there wasn't a demand for handmade goods the Amish wouldn't sell any hand made furniture. There is no doubt that more automation will reduce the cost of living, it has been true for hundreds of years.
I agree. On top of that, they people who own the businesses (and thus majority of the wealth) will hire lobbyists or pay politicians to stop universal basic income laws because it is significantly cheaper than actually paying those high taxes. Yet, most of the non-niche categories will be lost to automation. Thus there will be a large push into entrepreneurship as their is no job stability anymore.
This is absurd , why are they wasting time debating when theres nothing to debate since the matter is long settled - we manufacture more in dollar terms than ever yet at the same time, infinitely less ppl work in the factories that make those products than 50 yrs ago . And if you think those ppl that lost jobs at the factories readjusted with new equally well-paid jobs thanks to this so-called creative destruction - then just visit former industrial behemoth towns like St. Louis , Dayton , Eerie, Cleveland, etc & you’ll see that it’s just destruction that was brought upon those cities when the factories became automated , destruction evidenced by the those cities’ high rates of poverty, unemployment , & suicides .
It looks like Martin Ford is completely clueless on economics (history and analysis). Just the fact that he mentions climate change as something to fear makes him un-scientific to me. On top of all this, he thinks that universal basic income is a great solution and promotes Andrew Yang as a guru of this solution: the same guy that did not show up to this debate. A bit pathetic as a debater and seems to have been running out of arguments very early in the debate if you ask me.
Wrong. Work creates a sense of purpose. It doesn't just exist to provide for external wants and needs. Work is in and of itself a need. Most humans are biologically wired for the effort, struggle, and routine of work. Work for the sake of work is a thing, and we must come to grips with that. An increase in the number of people lacking in a sense of purpose will necessarily lead to increased mental illness and destructive tendencies, and this trend is already revealing itself. Work will always exist though, partly because differences between individuals and groups will always cause differences in needs and wants that will disrupt existing systems, and those disruptions will require some form of work to overcome them. The winners and losers of opposing wills always will guarantee the existence of work.
@@MilwaukeeF40C Whichever way you provide value exchange with others is work or a 'real' job. If what you call "work" is simply busying yourself to distract from reality, that is unlikely to lead to a real sense of purpose. If what you prefer to do actually provides value to others and gives you a greater sense of purpose than your "real" job, then maybe pursue that end instead. However, the real issue here may be dissatisfaction with status. The lack of status provided by one's paying job can lead people to believe that they would prefer to do something else that they imagine will provide a greater degree of status. But imaginary status is only a distraction, and pursuit of that alone will lead only to disappointment. Efficiently providing value exchange to others will definitely lead to a degree of higher status than simple dreaming, though maybe never the kind of status society promotes as the end all be all. Today's society puts too much emphasis on status and too little on providing value, which is extremely destructive, since status is always relative and for the few, but value exchange is for everyone.
If there are masses (1/3 of population) of people permanently put out of work by future automation, why wouldn't those people form their own economy (just like current and past economies)? I mean, if a robot plumber takes my plumbing job, why wouldn't I sell plumbing services to a similarly affected doctor in exchange for her services?
@@iraholden3606 @@iraholden3606 So you think the unemployed human doctors would all be so proud that they would rather starve to death than take a pay cut?
No, it won't. It will devalue the currency and work while increasing unemployment. Then the whole economy collapses. Been tried before, didn't work, never will.
@@sujimayne It's not socialism. It's capitalism that doesn't start at 0. UBI studies show that it doesn't cause inflation and Yang's UBI plan doesn't print any money. It will actually create jobs cause people can start businesses in their dying towns as people have money to spend it locally.
Get govt regulation out of our way and the markets will adjust, new jobs we never thought of will arise out of thin air and things will keep churning like always. Get the government meddling in things and all the doomsday prophecies about automation and AI will come true
I was on hold with the IRS when an automated voice said, "Please don't hang up. Your call is important to us."
That's all. That's the whole joke.
the IRS is the punchline
Epstein didn't kill himself
what are you looking for I already said the thing
"Don't you hate it when you go into the washroom and there's no toilet paper?"
That's the joke!!
Hey you suck McBain!!!
To have a smoother, less displacing transition into automation, you need to get rid of min wage and other labor laws.
Ultimately, robots will reach a point and price that will render human labor obsolete. But the robots themselves need to be built and owned, as well as all the other economic resources. By abolishing IP and various other state supports and subsidies to the technocrats and big business (fiat money, infrastructure) it would decentralize the economy and ownership of the robots amongst the masses. We would all be investors and shareholders, reaping dividends off robot production, with some entrepreneurs, and AI taking the role of management
it would make current labor obsolete in the long run, but then knew forms of labor we don't even know about right now will replace it.
@@kathykelly5930 that's thankfully a falsifiable claim, if you look at industrial revolutions of the past the jobs in the new sector were numerous and somewhat similar in terms of skill level,
But emerging sectors in the current industrial revolution offer far fewer jobs and have huge differences in terms of skill level in comparison to the jobs they displaced.
(Compare employment opportunities offered by Ford during the t20 era vs Google right now)
It's always good to remember that the market has a track record of _never_ catering to individuals that do not offer productivity to the market.
The proportion of humans that offer subsistence level productivity is getting smaller.
@@havenotchosenyet Your last statement is true because the population is older than ever and we are having less kids, so yes a larger percentage of the population can't produce now more than ever because of age. But we have unemployment rates now lower than in the 60's with way more automation in that time span. Automation is just a tool, a tool eliminates certain aspects of work but opens up new ones as well.
@@kathykelly5930 this old dumb argument that there will always be human labor needed. It's completely false when a machine can do a better job than a hundred workers because of efficiency. Thats a hundred jobs gone and replaced by machines and, as population increases, it will present and even bigger problem.
Equal number for jobs for humans and machines is unrealistic.
@@lynnpabontheelitehero6579 if you don't move you'll atrophy to death, therefor people will be incentivized to not go to the gym and instead do something more meaningful....that meaningful action is subject to one's knowledge and skills
Before industrialization people were saying the same thing... Look how advanced and better off literally every single human being is now. 90%+ of the population used to be in agriculture and now the it's below 5%. Society has gotten better. Automation will be another great leap for mankind.
The difference is there’s not a single job that automation can’t do. Including producing art and music.
@@dirremoire except there is... there is already a market for handmade products/services.
???
@@BicBoi1984 how are you going to employ 7 billion people in selling hand made products?
Not a logical argument at all
The key difference is "Auto" mation means it works without the need for humans , therefore unemployment follows.
I’m not sure of how big of a problem automation will be, but I am fairly confident that most left wing policies to solve this problem will likely make it worse.
The left wing policies are the real problem .
@Jacke DenFria it's been a while since have been on this channel . I forgot that this channel is bias and supports libertarian ideology. I will not comment again.
That answer all my questions. Your beliefs are no govt and big businesses flourish. I rather not debate with you.
@Jacke DenFria Subsidies and regulatory capture hinder innovation and productivity. Patents are private property. They are essential.
@@lynnpabontheelitehero6579 You're a goober.
@Jacke DenFria Not having IP protections would hinder innovation massively. Why would anyone put all that effort and capital into creating a product or service while it's ok for the bloke down the road to just copy and try sell for himself. Alot more people take the entrepreneur risk when they know there product is going to be protected. That's why there alot more innovations and inventions in Western countries where there are IP protections than others.
The argument against automation taking jobs having the solution being that people will just be happy making stuff is weak and erases the fact that work doesnt make us human.
Laying around on the couch all day watching tv does not make us human either. Life does not seem too dignified right now for those spending their time waiting for the welfare check to show up. I shudder to think of a society where that is the norm.
@@mikebetts2046 When this become a norm, nobody will be ashamed to stand in a line to take it....as he is not the only one standing... lol 😆
@@samratpaul25 There is wisdom in the bible verse that says "by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread". Human nature has not changed in the entire span of recorded history. Our technology does. Too many people lack the wisdom to see the ills we keep on producing year after year when we step all over ancient wisdom. There are some people that will convert free time into beneficial things for the rest of humanity, but far too many that will do little of value when there is no need to work. The evidence is all around us. I have been alive long enough to start seeing this downhill pattern first-hand.
@@mikebetts2046 Yes I agree, but i also think the benefits of AI outweighs its risks.
@@clumsyclicker3199 whether or not you believe in the bible is meaningless. The point is that the bible, among other great works of literature is saying something true about human nature. In this case that a person should work for what they want or need.
I agree that we could work for fewer hours per day and maintain a standard of living equivalent to sometime in the past, but that too does not matter much in this context.
The fact remains that human wants seem to be boundless. We always want more. But also, there are some people who are willing to work for what they want and others who will sit around and wait for someone else to do the work.
Any system that rewards the lazy will grow the ranks of the lazy.
Yeah deflation wasn't the cause of great depression, it was the cure. Things got over valued, people ran out of money, the economy crashed, things got cheaper, economy started rolling again. It was restructuring the unsustainable economy.
It's not about the number of jobs Automation can create. It's about the aging workforce that can not and will not be moved or retrained for those roles. New startups are disrupting all kinds of industries so its' also not about concentrating wealth towards one group. Wealth will move all over the place. Kids growing up and the H1B of bringing other countries workforces here will fill these new jobs. He misses two things.. 1. This workforce isn't prepared for the next workforce that is needed. 2. Automation isn't just robots. An accounting department of years ago 50 is now down to 10. Agencies, Companies etc find ways to remove overhead: People. They cost the most and are the most problematic. We need to prepare and promote and more entrepreneurial workforce for people to generate their own income instead of being left to filling low skilled positions that aren't easily replaced by automation or software tools.
Robots won't, but the minimum wage will.
Just because the minimum wage is x dollars per hour doesn't mean someone can afford to pay it. I work for minimum wage, and I still think it should be lower.
No you dont
+psy. FFS, dont talk about economic questions when you clearly dont understand how the economy works. "Afford to pay" argument is like someone arguing a square wheel will work better. Its fucking clueless!!!
@@Lobos222 That's not a counter-argument, that's a statement.
@@fencefirst2722 Yes, I do. My biggest fear is that the minimum wage will go up and I'll be laid off.
@@psyxypher3881 The libertarian audience has started to reinforce their own ideas among themselves, this is not a good sign; all models are wrong, some are useful.
The automation claim is simple:
1. Humans have only 2 things to offer in terms of productive potential: physical and cognitive labour.
2. _ALL_ physical labour has been automated, so people moved to cognitive tasks like gardening and scientific research.
(Notice gardening is under cognitive labour, the component of gardening that is yet to be automated is the cognitive component, the physical component of that job can be done for less than a cent an hour.
3. Computers start to automate cognitive tasks too, so people start to move from low degree of freedom tasks to higher degrees of freedom. (DOF has nothing to do with what people find difficult ex: multiplying two million digit numbers has a lower degree of freedom than recognizing a cat in an image)
4. Humans have a limited number of DOF to offer, there is nothing to say that AI will stop before that limit, more likely it will proceed way beyond that.
5. Unemployment will become a problem waaay before the scenario in (4.) We have to remember that during previous automation waves there were mass riots and a lot of suicides.
6. *And this is the most important point, the market has a track record of **_never_** catering to people without productive potential* .
Thus UBI, or at the very least we better start experimenting with alternative economic models till we find something that is resilient to large portions of the population being _unemployable_
The world is changing our economic models need to keep up, there is no end of history, fukuyama was wrong
Could you actually get some experts?? I get better debates at the bar.
The main reason that artificial intelligence (AI) will take far more jobs than other technology is "human intuition". In almost every job, things go wrong, and the worker must find a creative way to fix the problem (like fixing a machine, cleaning up a mess, etc.). Because of this, an actual person was required for many jobs, even jobs that could be mostly automated. AI specifically seeks to exhibit human intuition, and in many ways AI has been successful at this. When robots can handle messy situations, then human workers will really be unnecessary.
Will steam engines take our jobs?
Are you a horse??
@@skylanh4319 no I'm a car
@@xapemanx then you don't have to worry about the steam engine.
If you don’t understand the difference between the steam engine and artificial intelligence, I don’t know what to tell you.
@@willpowell4392 The point hes making is that technology and advancement never hinders jobs, it creates new ones
Automation is not the problem,the potential causes of unemployment are the expansion of regulation and debt .
and central banking!
@@andrewbrasuell8589 True!
Regulations do not exist in a vacuum.
They exist for a reason and Serv a purpose. You breath clean air and drink safe water because industrialist were forbidden from polluting them in their persuit of profits at any cost. You did not live in a time before regulations so you don't know what it was like to have to work for employers who could not be bother to take your safety into account because doing so would mean extra cost at the expense of their sacred bottom line.
But hey it's cool.
@@juanfernandez1696 You are mixing rationalization with purpose,and leftist propaganda with history.
abram galler He's not, he's speaking sense, after the industrial revolution Thames vecame so poluted that the empire started putting those regulations in place at least in London, and with the polution fines they financed new embakments on the river to make it faster so that it would stench less. If not for regulation all those 10% of people in US between 25 and 55 who can't work in today's society would starve to death. so... think about that
Many people seem to think that automation is going to suddenly appear and half the world's population will lose their jobs in one day. That's how people who are against automation and want to heavily regulate it think.
But that's ridiculous. Fully autonomous automation is first going to happen in places that are already almost fully automatized and it will happen in select few countries and companies at first, not fully, not everywhere. It could take a decade or more for just a single job to become nearly fully automated from the point when automatization of said job starts. Said people will need to look for work in other companies and other position, but they'll have *years* to prepare for that for sure.
Many low-skilled and low-paying jobs won't get automated for a long time because humans will still be more reliable and adapt better to various potentially dangerous situations, while machines are expensive and complex and don't adapt to major changes very well.
So, no one will be jobless? No, of course not, tons of people will lose their current jobs but a majority will quickly find other jobs. And EVERYONE will be better off because things will get cheaper and safer.
@@BrianRGioia well said
So, to sum up your dumbass comment, it's: "it's going to happen but it just won't happen anytime soon, so it's okay . Let the people in the future worry about it".
Got it. You're a fucking moron
"yes"=government can solve my problems
"No"= I'm not a puppet
Martin got demolished.
But what's scarier is the comments on here who are on his side, and who address none of Antony's points anyway.
And yes there is kind of an economic law that proves automation can't end up with mass poverty. Antony said what it was. As prices plummet, work becomes obsolete. You don't NEED to work. Martin is worried about the possibility of huge factories making millions of widgets for no one, a thing that could never happen.
Martin lost all credibility when he kept bringing up "deflation".
@@MBarberfan4life Well most charitable explanation I can have of this is that Martin thought the dropping prices in the question would be caused by deflation, which is what he says is bad, and not automation. No idea why he'd think that in this context but at least that makes more sense than thinking falling prices are bad, which obviously no one thinks is true.
This is a problem I find on the internet and even in person. People just come with what they have to say and never actually say why what I have said is wrong! Check out my debate with Richard Wolff for more of the same.
-pox power- if the government had a big role, it would happen - witness the operation of Soviet factories building things no one wanted
@@poxpower do you think the government (and banks) would allow a deflating GDP? I'm all for going back to a gold standard, so that we can actually have deflation. But, we don't, so maybe austrians should stop talking about rainbows and unicorns.
How many truckers are going to become Spanish Guitar players?
What did such people do before there was trucking? In the end, people will do the jobs that are needed.
Point missed
Fair point. But, the real question is whom do you believe is better suited to determining what new employment the truck driver should seek? Government policies will necessarily limit options for the truck driver through licensing and other restrictions. A competitive market maximizes the available choices for those who need those alternatives most desperately. Is it better to have a displaced trucker who chooses not to become a Spanish guitarists, or one who cannot become one because it's illegal?
@@aaronchapin9331 A UBI (Freedom Dividend) does not limit the way a citizen spends the money.
I agree that government funded retraining programs don't work.
I predict that there pace of change will be faster in this industrial revolution and people won't have the time to retrain even if they live near an appropriate school.
How many autometed trucks can put diesel in and pay?
Affirmative guy is limited by his failed understanding of the Great Depression. He needs to read Rothbard and Murphy instead of just Hayek
I'm all for automation. I think in the long run it will cause price decreases, increase vacation time and weekend to 3 days, and reduce normal work day to 6 hours or less. But we are in the beginning of a major transition period and it will go on for a few more decades. We need to figure out how to manage this transition without causing mass unemployment and social unrest.
That also reduces your pay to half as much as use to be. Why do you works so many hours? to get more pay. You work half as many hours and suddenly half your income is gone, not much of a shocker. On top of this jobs will get more competitive as more workers will apply to a shrinking amount of jobs making labor conditions and pay even worse on top of your lower hours. Life satisfaction is going to decline dramatically.
The thing is, wealth isn't created to not be consumed. With automation creating unlimited supply, prices would approach zero (prices=supply/demand, limit(supply->0)=0). This would absolutely, undeniably, break our economy.
Only a few sectors would be spared, namely land and natural resources, and with the latter it's only a matter of time until we start mining asteroids.
In other words, even if half of the population gets fired, there will be more wealth left for the other half to ever be consumed. This wealth is destined to be distributed somehow, in some ways we can't even imagine yet. I bet on new age charities to lead this effort (more resembling factory owners just giving away stuff to the local community than actually organised charities), but again, we can't possibly imagine it yet
Break is probably not the correct word. Voluntary interaction is still capitalism. No particular outcome is the correct one.
@@MilwaukeeF40C Yes but our ideas of currency, income, profit, growth, distribution of wealth, etc etc
I keep thinking that the reason UBI is being discussed more and more over the last 5 years is that the power structure is preparing the masses for earning far less money.
UBI is a self fulfilling prophecy, pay ppl for doing nothing and they do more of nothing.
@@kathykelly5930 I think that's generally true. If unemployment is incentivized, more unemployment is what we should expect. However, I'd support UBI in the form of a negative income tax which replaced *all* other entitlement programs. It's always a case of tradeoffs, which can make even the most extreme proposals reasonable by contrast.
@@aaronchapin9331 I would take UBI if we could wipe out the rest of the entitlements too. Yang is championing UBI but its on top of everything else.
@@kathykelly5930 Wrong. He does not stack it with things like SNAPS or other cash-like programs. He only stacks it with Social Security (which is your right to keep after paying into it for decades), SSDI (disability that you can only get if you have worked at some point in your life), and things like housing assistance. I encourage you to dig into it more, and not just listen to biased outlets that want you to believe Andrew is some kind of hardcore socialist.
@@darthclide nope, go to his website, last I checked its on top of everything else. The SS trust is dry, before the end of every year they have to borrow from other programs, it is not solvent.
"where the truck drivers live", umm you mean in the major cities? Most trucking jobs are in the metropolitan areas so I'm not sure why he thinks truckers all live in the countryside.
I am one of those truckers that will be displaced, and I'm looking forward to driving not being a required use of human capital. I love to drive, but the long demanding hours and seditary nature of the job are not a good fit for the human body and causes many otherwise preventable medical issues.
There was never any economist who saw a whole industry evolve around SEO. Yet here we are.
My ENTIRE biz is on UA-cam . No one predicted that... ever!
Heritage Wealth Planning Why should I use your services when AI will do a far better job of investment planing at a lower cost?
Humanity was terrified that automation/mechanization would cause huge unemployment over a century ago. And look at our unemployment rate now? It was all silly blather.
Robotics will make are lives FAR better and humanity will find other - more productive - things to work at.
I welcome robotics and automation.
Besides, what is the alternative? Stop innovating? Stop inventing?
That is ridiculous.
I keep thinking of AOC every time they say "in ten years oh my!"
Our labor force participation rate is abysmal. Our underemployment rate is abysmal. Our life expectancy has dropped for 3 years in a row (suicide rate is a big contributor to this). The list goes on and on, but I encourage you to look up what Trump was saying in 2016. *Hint* He was saying the unemployment rate is a bogus number. So why did 20% of Americans believe him then, but now they worship that number in 2020 when he says our country is doing great?
@@darthclide 1) You do realize that the LFPR is FAR better then it was 50 years ago. And mechanization has greatly increased in that time. So your argument there means nothing.
2) The U-3 is under 4%. So your argument there is nothing.
3) And Trump called it a 'hoax' - not 'bogus'. And I agree with him.
But even looking at the U-6 or the employment-population ratio. There is ZERO evidence that mechanization has done anything bad to the employed in America.
@@McRocket "U3 is the rate of unemployment released each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), but many economists view the U-6 rate as the more meaningful rate because it covers a larger percentage of people who are unemployed."
Nice try. Thousands of economists are warning about the next industrial revolution. And I would love to see you walk up to the store clerks who lost their job to self-checkout and say "ZERO EVIDENCE". Among the myriad of others who have lost their jobs and are now suffering because they don't have the skill to become a programmer or IT technician.
Also, what does it matter what our labor force participation rate was 50 years ago other than stroking our egos and saying "my, look how far we have come"?, if it still means many Americans are still without work. All the numbers show that this is the worst time to undergo the 4th industrial revolution. And yet people like you act as if this transition will be a peaceful walk in the park with no tears or bloodshed. Or let me guess... You think that most of these shootings come from truly racist people, and that it has nothing to do with economic insecurity?
And nice job moving the goalposts with Trump. He specifically said that the underemployment rate did not represent the true pain Americans are facing. And yet now he is proudly proclaiming what a great economy he has created, based primarily on those supposed "fake" unemployment numbers.
@@darthclide 1) Show me a list from an unbiased source of these ''thousands of economists are warning about the next industrial revolution.'?
2) So show me a link to unbiased, factual proof that robotics will increase unemployment when history shows us that mechanization did not increase unemployment one, little bit?
You have ZERO unbiased, factual proof that robotics will raise unemployment at all.
it's so stupidly funny to see the guy saying "it's the great depression when the prices and the wages get deflation"
Simple answer...YES...even robots will build robots. Programs will write themselves. All jobs will become obsolete if general AI becomes a reality. However, this automation will produce abundance and the economy can shift to a different means of exchange beyond our current conception of how an economy should look.
Worst case scenario, humans will create a parallel economic market whit their on cripto currency. They will make things by hand, sell food planted by them. it will be a primitive way of living. And you will have the official economic market just run by robots and a few very reach healthy people.
@@alexandrelobo8524, I'm not sure that makes sense unless it's an intentional movement like the Amish. General AI would essentially be a sustainable variant of a "UBI."
@@deanwhite6741 people will not have money..... How will they buy products? Where will they find a job??
@@alexandrelobo8524, that's reductive. Why would they need to have a job if an AI does it better? The paradigm of having a job relies on the principle of acquisition of scarce resources. General AI would provide sufficient resources to sustain existence. There would be a paradigm shift in what is needed to be done (i.e. to get food, etc.) vs what can be done when these basic necessities are abundant and readily consumable.
Having prices go down 70% while wages go down 20% is called an "increase in buyer power" or "increase in the value of a dollar", which is how the middle class got invented. That's not a depression; dont fight it
The Fed disagrees. What are you prepared to do about it? I think we should put Austrians in jail until they learn what inflation targeting is.
@@yeow23 having a disagreement is not an argument.
Great debate! I'm looking forward to the upcoming debates Gene mentioned!
What if we develop the tractor and every farmer is put out of work? Im scared we are all gonna get poor from that
The tractor replaced the horse, not the farmer. Look at what the technology actually does. Does the technology aid in the physical labor? Or does the technology outright do your job. Artificial Intelligence is meant to replace real intelligence.
@@Kaokidx10 The 500 horsepower tractor with 1 farmer replaced 500 farmers with 1000 horses.
@@Kaokidx10 AI can't own the farm. Only a person can
The only way to counter automation is to lower the minimum wage.
Johan R are u joking? We should embrace automation and give people a financial/health safety net that allows them to live a dignified life without selling their labor
There shouldnt even be a minimum wage.
Johan R has that helped countries where wage is very low?
@@nickcherries I don't know about you, but I personally think that working for $7 an hour is better than not working at all. And the increases in minimum wage are making it is cheaper to use robots instead of people.
Second, selling your labor is a part of life. Scarcity is a reality. And more importantly *labor is a commodity*. The minimum wage doesn't benefit workers; it is a violation of their right to work for less than minimum wage.
If I want to work for $3 an hour, why is the government allowed to stop me? You might say that companies would exploit workers, but I don't think about big companies like Amazon, but Joe Sandwich Guy running a food truck and his nephew who needs a job and job experience. Joe can't afford to pay minimum wage, despite the fact that his nephew would gladly work for less.
@@YourDaddysBelt69 yeah there should be a maximum wage!!!
I don't think demand is infinite. Our time and attention as consumers are also scarce.
As automation concentrates market share into the hands of companies like Disney and Netflix that have the budgets to advertise and grab attention, smaller businesses will be outcompeted. The product of which is a winner take all economy. UBI will at least provide people enough means to live and participate in such an economy.
Remember the ATM? We were told it would put all bank tellers out of work.
We still have Tellers, but we also have ATM designers, manufacturers, servicers, programmers,
etcetera. This may mean that a person would have to switch vocations or learn a new skill
first. I have had to learn a new skill and find a new job in a different area multiple times,
it is not hard.
As long as you don't create SkyNet or some other DoomsDay device...
ATMs basically still only work well for getting money out, in small amounts of 20s only.
It's not hard for certain people with the intelligence or flexibility needed to make such a transition. But I'm confident that huge swaths of the population will not be able to make a transition to meaningful work.
@@mikebetts2046 I am confident of that too and I am exploring ways to exploit it.
I don’t understand what all the automation would be used for if all the the consumers have no money.
UBI... Free stuff. Star trek life
@@naturalisted1714
You think it's a good thing if the government controls your money?
@@spiffygonzales5899 The government can't control it, Yang will tie UBI to inflation and everyone gets it. No politician is going to remove it unless they want massive public backlash.
You can also choose to not put in UBI and watch everything crumble, I bet the government will respond well to that.
@@Aer0xander
So the government gets all the money and decides who gets what... Well that sounds similar to something else I've heard of
@@Aer0xander
Let me ask you, where will UBI come from?
2 points. First, I wish Antony framed the debate better. Because if this was just an interesting academic question, there's certainly some probability that what Martin say may happen. But the problem is, that this is not an academic question only. People that are for affirmative argue what they argue, because they want to introduce massive interférences into economy that should protect us against this supposed problem. And the evidence bar for that should be significantly higher then what they present. As usual, they focus only on their perceived problem and completely discard the potential massive downsides their policy prescriptions may create.
And second, I wish someone finally dealt with the deflation argument. It's 100% a straw man. I understand how it's supposed to work on macro level, but did anyone did reality check? Do you really think that in normal world people will not purchase a car, a house, a washing machine if they need it, just because it may be 2% cheaper next year? Time preference beats deflation almost every time. It's mind boggling that hundred years after Bohm-Bawerk people still completely forget that there's something like a time preference. Of course, there's one exception to that - indeed, companies may postpone their capital investment, if they believe that someone like a CENTRAL BANK will print a bunch of money and make their debts cheaper. Indeed. But alas, here we have the self-fulfilling prophecy in all it's beauty.
@56:51 how does paying someone the UBI poverty wage of $12k a year give them a purpose? How does this subsidy not contribute to the same "poverty trap" dependency of traditional welfare? What would inspire an 18 year old with no job and 2 roommates to play video games for life with a combined UBI income of $36k? You expect people to work for purpose instead of drugs/sex?
Yes. In the same way that the machine gun would definitely end war. Nobody would continue fighting with such dangerous weapons. This time it is totally different than the past. Really.
+Chad. Humanity has had "robot" economy before actually... The Romans, for example, had it, but it wasnt robots. It was slaves. In turn MOST Roman citizens lived in squalor, the economy was small and the rich were very rich and owned everything with very little upwards mobility for everybody else. I mean, the US fought a civil war over the negatives of a "robot economy" (slaves undercutting competition in none slave states and in turn also limiting citizen buying power via less jobs and more competition for those jobs etc).
Lobos222 this is well put. I would add that policies like UBI that put cash in the hands of people actually increases this. People give the money to Amazon and now the big corps can afford to build better robots.
Unfortunately, humans have always been violent. But we've only labored in the way we are now for 100 years.
Hydrogen Bombs
For the short term we will work with robots but not the long term.
The elephant in the room in this debate was AI - Artificial Intelligence - which no-one mentioned or discussed. They are rehashing old arguments about "robotics" - which have replaced manual workers. AI will have the potential to replace professions, not just task based employment. In other words, lawyers, doctors, accountants, architects. Shame the debaters missed this.
AI is a long, long, long ass way off.
With the abundance that comes from AI doing most of the work the biggest problem I see is people having a lot of time on their hands and not knowing what to do with themselves. I know that people who are creative will be happiest and those who can teach skills will too. We all need a purpose and I see a positive view of the future where we will have the freedom to indulge in what we are interested in like rich people have always been able to do.
Worst case scenario, humans will create a parallel economic market whit their on cripto currency. They will make things by hand, sell food planted by them. it will be a primitive way of living. Working on a job will very dificult because machines will have all the job vacancies. People will not have any money And you will have the official economic market just run by robots and a few very reach healthy people.
My thoughts prior to the debate: Yes, at first, but it will help more people in the long run (just like any other invention that has put people out of a job at the moment of implementation).
Mr. Ford unfortunately doesn't understand the difference between economic expansion (aggregate supply grows faster than demand) and contraction (demand falls faster than supply). Both have a general fall in prices. The latter characterizes recessions and widespread default, while the former characterizes prosperity and natural credit expansion. This former has indeed happened historically with falling prices, most notably in the US during the incorrectly named "long depression" (yes, Mr. Ford has not been the only scholar to make this rather dramatic error). He makes some useful points, but this big error does taint his understanding of the macroeconomic effects of disruptive innovation. He should confine his predictions to short term effects.
If it was that simple. Wages would be up, in buying power context, not down. Like they are in the US... There wont be any "Spanish guitarist" latte if you have to compete with 1 million workers to get that single paying job a Ai or robot hasnt taken.
Lobos222 “pass on the savings” is a hoax
You assume humans can only sell labor
No, of course it won’t just like it has not done so thus far. This is the debate which Andrew Yang initially said he would do in the affirmative before backing out.
What is missed by many is that the past revolutions created more effective tools. But what is coming isn't more effective tools. The coming revolution will create WORKERS. The automation will be able to completely displace a good fraction of the work force. We are at the very start of a revolution in how business of many types is conducted.
Really this is just the continuation and inevitable outcome of the industrial revolution. At first you are only capable of enhancing the performance of the workers, but over time you improve it little by little until the tool you started with that helped the worker is capable of replacing the worker.
The industrial revolution was fuelled by workers displaced from agriculture, as it became vastly more efficient.
Antony Sammeroff is the real deal. He literally wrote the book on Universal Basic Income.
Rational Rise TV The reviews on his book is 3.9/5 on Amazon. That may be a sign 🤔
The big points, imo, on this general subject are...
...unemployment statistics aren't impressive. I'm unemployed, but because I do not qualify for unemployment I am not counted in those statistics. All you have to do is narrow the scope and you can make statistics say whatever you want, and make whatever point you want to make.
...businesses need customers, the consumer class is not in much danger here no matter what happens. The goal should be to reduce suffering, not to prevent disaster.
...not everybody will be suited for the jobs the future needs, you can't just re-educate somebody and expect them to keep up, you can't just tell somebody to "learn to code" and expect any results.
...automation is here already, it's a gradual process. Have you seen the new mcdonalds screens? Have you seen walmarts self checkout lanes? More and more, and faster than we think, people ARE losing jobs to automation, it's just misleading to say that they're "losing jobs" when it's more a case of reduced hiring. AI is also here already, it monitors temps, learns their jobs, and then the temps are let go so the AI can do it. This is happening, right now.
(and others I may be forgetting right now)
In my opinion, rising technology is to blame 100% for government failing to ruin absolutely everybodies lives. It's just too powerful a force for good. I honestly don't care who wins elections, because all parties are technophobic in one way or another, I only care that technology continues to advance despite them.
A UBI seems like a fantastic idea to me, it would ease the most suffering and promote the most advancement, as well as accidentally solve a lot of other problems (homelessness, chronic unemployability, illegal immigration) but I'm uncertain if our economy and technology are yet powerful enough to support it. Someday, maybe not today, but someday.
You're right, there isn't a fundamental law that prevents technological unemployment. What you have to argue tough, is it good or bad? Let's take the radiologist example. 100k radiologist will likely soon go unemployed, the whole branch of employment will grow obsolete with a single piece of image reading program. Sucks to be radiologist. So what does the radiologist does? He goes on to become a nurse or a doctor of somekind. That means, across a period of time, we got 100k more doctors and nurses, without increasing the overall labour cost of the healthcare sector. Technology makes things cheaper. And that's good for us.
I'm going to guess that a lot of those radiologists are not going to make great doctors and nurses. Radiologists might choose their profession based in part on not having the desire or ability to interact with the patient as much as needed to be a doctor or nurse.
@@mikebetts2046 That's fine. Either way, we, the patients, would save not having to pay the 100k radiologist wages. Cheaper healthcare. Nevertheless, we would get 0-100k more doctors. Instead of us paying the radiologist wages, we would get a bigger chance to pay the doctors or nurses appointments wages. Deflation.
Almost 90% of jobs were replaced within a generation by machines in the 1900's...
(and it didn't cause 90% unemployment then)
Economics just boils down to how much energy you have to put out vs how much you can earn for it. You can express this in Calories:
8 hours of unskilled labor cost you about 2,500 Calories (upper case 'C' aka "Food calories" or Kilocalories)....
>In 1800, the money earned could only buy, at most 2500 Cal in other labor.
>But in 2020, you can buy *at least* 1,116,000 Calories in the form of gasoline.
....granted, much of that benefit is lost in the conversion to goods due to regulatory redundancy), but the production of many many many goods is unaffected by this cheap energy....and that is what automation will improve, from a "whole picture perspective"
Automation will just mean shorter work weeks for those who want that, as things will cost so much less, and equally more wealth for those who don't.
Most future jobs will be more human-interaction based, also. Service industry, etc... you'll see alot more life coaches I'll bet, for example ..
Money saved through efficiency is reinvested in the business. It doesn't get wasted on the out of worker.
Facinating discussion. Thank you Reason TV!
Silly doom and gloom from the 'Yes' side. Reminded me very much of the rhetoric over climate alarmism and that there's a crisis so we need to act, which obviously means more taxes and more gov interference in the economy in some way which absolutely WILL affect the economy negatively and cause more unemployment.
Great job on the debate Antony. Shared.
shout out to the Canadian Libertarian for creating great Libertarian content :)
After the Terminators start killing jobs can I still be a novelist?
Jon Haugan Nah, probably robots will understand better than you consummer preferences and write a much better novel
@@Victor-my1hi Thank you and have a good day, CONSUMMER. :)
Jon Haugan do you want me to say reader, when all people are writting nowadays is just crap made to sell, when books are rated by their sales numbers. When the most bought book segment in US is self improvement, and most of those books are just crap, pure crap, made to pray on the most vulnerable, who are searching for a way to improvement. Novel industry is dead in terms of the value that modern novels will hold in literature when we look back 100 yrs from now. Do you think people are going to study the meaning and ideas explored in "50 shades of grey"?
@@Victor-my1hi You are assuming that my work is anything like 50 Shades. It's not, I assure you. And I was pointing out that you misspelled the word consumer. Not CONSUMMER. Secondly, if you were trying to troll me I would give you the friendly advice to learn how to spell properly in these forums. It doesn't look good to try to jab at someone's intellect or intellectual abilities online if you can't spell, punctuate, or use proper grammar.
Maybe there is something beyond a consumer based economy.
Not as long as government is forcing inflation down our throats. It's government literal stated goal. Destroy the purchasing power of the money, a bit at a time, to force us to buy stuff we don't really need today, because we won't afford it tomorrow.
Voluntary interaction.
It’s also about the timing. Previous Industrial Revolutions took place over decades or even a century-plus. AI is advancing at a MUCH more rapid pace and the rate of adoption of new technology has been on the rise. Look at how long it took to get a refrigerator into the majority of US houses versus how long to sell 200,000,000 smart phones.
With this pace of change, many people will be out of work long before a suitable job comes along and they will be bankrupt.
If it is handled properly, the people who will benefit most from automation will be small-business owners.
handled by whom?
Worst case scenario, humans will create a parallel economic market whit their on cripto currency. They will make things by hand, sell food planted by them. it will be a primitive way of living. And you will have the official economic market just run by robots and a few very reach healthy people.
Yang gang 2020
Yes!
Government spends $100 billion/yr fighting a war against people who do the wrong drugs; Now what exactly are you inferring when you state that using an illegal drug is negatively correlated with holding a job?
If you think automation is going to take jobs, then you clearly have not worked in a warehouse. You know what came before forklifts and pallet jacks? By hand. All automation machines we have break down, so our MECHANICS WORK on a daily basis fixing them. No one will have driverless semis because of the nuances that come with being a truck driver: upkeep, security and handling of the load. Not to mention the paperwork the driver has to sign. Im remember people talking about automation taking jobs, ten years ago. If its such a rapid pace of automation that we cant keep up, where is it? I still have a job at a warehouse. Or are you just scaring the public with your false revelations?
the luddites are like those cults who are always saying the world is ending, okay it didn't happen this time buts its coming
"Can you put a truck driver to take care of the elderly? No."
Why not?
The whole problem is that central banks are not allowing prices to come down as productivity goes up. Of course things look dire when prices which should be going down are being "artificially" being brought up.
If prices were allowed to come down, people could accept works that receive fewer units of dollars, but maintain their standard of living. In fact, some of those might, as one of the speakers mentions, voluntarily reduce their work hours, which would also help increasing demand for work.
Then again, there's a problem with Education, which didn't really update to form people with the adequate mind for a society in the information age. Productive people in the new age, are those that never stop learning. As times goes on, more and more will be demanded cognitively from agents, but that's a trend that's been happening up until now as well.
People don't know this, but in the 19th century wages went down overall, but prices fell even further. If you just left your money in your mattress it would gain value. A slow deflationary economy means booming wealth, a slowly inflationary economy means a slow quiet death.
Who cares about automation, when we can all become coders!
LeArN To CoDE
"The guild of coder will chose if we will share the knowledge of the codes...for a "fair" fee(9300% of life earnings of a normal person) of course."
You're a dumbass. Not everybody knows how to code.
You're right, there isn't a fundamental law that prevents technological unemployment. What you have to argue tough, is it good or bad? Let's take the radiologist example. 100k radiologist will likely soon go unemployed, the whole branch of employment will grow obsolete with a single piece of image reading program. Sucks to be radiologist. So what does the radiologist does? He goes on to become a nurse or a doctor of somekind. That means, across a period of time, we got 100k more doctors and nurses, without increasing the overall labour cost of the healthcare sector. Technology makes things cheaper. And that's good for us.
@@Tenebrousable I think that is a long way off.
Nevertheless, its adoption in the United States (as with universal healthcare) occurred later than most other countries. Switzerland, for example, conducted a popular referendum on UBI as early as 2016,* with a proposed amount of $2,800/month. Meanwhile, a small-scale pilot project in Namibia during 2004 cut poverty from 76% to 37%, boosted education and health, increased non-subsidised incomes, and cut crime.* An experiment involving 6,000 people in India had similar success.*
In the short to medium term, rising unemployment was highly disruptive and triggered an unprecedented crisis.* For the US, in particular, it led to some of the biggest economic reforms in modern history.* In the longer term, however, it was arguably a positive development for humanity.* UBI acted as a temporary bridge or stepping stone to a post-scarcity world, with even greater advances in robotics and automation occurring in the late 21st century and beyond.**
I could work on art all day.
And perhaps you could teach art to those who want to learn too. I truly see this happening in the future as people will have so much more time to enjoy doing things they want to do.😊
Guess we should all learn to code
This time we're not just coming up with a better tool. It's not a cotton gin or assembly line or an agricultural combine that is being invented. We're creating the workers themselves. We won't be displacing workers to some other industry - we're replacing the workers in every industry.
Are we really dumb enough to believe that the real purpose of building these robots is not to displace the work of humans .
obviously it will, but then that creates new opportunities and jobs that don't even exist. Some of the most common jobs today didn't exist 10-20 years ago.
@@BrianRGioia Automation has already destroyed jobs for low income ppl for hundreds of years, but it creates new opportunities that you could never predict.
@@BrianRGioia
IQ is a shit statistic that doesnt have to be a limiting factor to most, just put some more effort into school and have a half decent education system and anybody can get a degree. There is also service jobs like retail that are very unlikley to be automated and dont require a complex degree
@@BrianRGioia There are almost no domestic workers anymore but most of that work is just not getting done, and is difficult and expensive to automate. I would really like a servant that can do stuff naked.
45:00
"If prices fall as result of automation, this deflation will make people unable to pay their debts"
Um, this isn't deflation, this is prices falling because the cost to produce said products or services have fallen. So the purchasing power of money is the same, this is just the value of the goods and services made by *automation specifically* that are falling
Silly libs. This is also the guy saying ubi is a good idea, despite the prices of goods and services going up proportionately. These are two accounts of his confusion of price dynamics
Freaking libs crack me up.
Just like Ice before the invention of ice makers brought down the prices of ice.
"So the purchasing power of money is the same, this is just the value of the goods and services made by automation specifically that are falling."
Hmm... no. The purchasing power of money is defined as the array of prices of goods that a monetary unit can buy. So if some prices fall, the purchasing power of money has increased. Vice versa for rising prices. In other words, the purchasing power of money is determined, among others, by the general amount of goods, so if the supply of some goods rises due to technological progress, the purchasing power of money goes up.
Deflation makes people richer,not poorer .
@@ohad157 But your purchasing power goes down if your employment or pay does. If the price of goods and services is going down about proportionally at about the same time, this is not as big of a deal.
Anyone else sick of the Bloomberg ads?
Automation will. It's not a debate if it will, but rather when.
there is economic law ... needs are infinite ... resource or more importantly time are scarce.... luddite and chicken little's never die
You say that others are crying wolf but you forget that at the end of the story the wolf does come.
@@juanfernandez1696 where did i say wolf ... and btw metaphors always have partial match ... more importantly it will be to address my economic argument ... as long as we have partialy free market there will always be new jobs because infinite needs beget new products i.e. new companies and new jobs.
@@TheMraptor their will be jobs and even new jobs but will their be enough jobs for the populace ?.
I have doubts because this time really is different.
@@juanfernandez1696 ai is nowhere near displacing labor in fact there will be more opportunity for low skill laborers to babysit ai .. there is more types of jobs now than ten years ago ... i know cause thats what i do ... ai systems are like a human savant moron which can be fooled by even slight change in input..
@@TheMraptor I really hope you are right and maybe I'm being too pessimistic about the future but ultimately time will tell.
you meant to tell me that people that don't go into engineering, computer science, mechanics etc, but instead take a few liberal arts courses and just become leftist politicians, can't accurately predict how automation will affect the market?
I do like his human approach to capitalism, everyone wants to be the powerhouse libertarian, but we need more of these guys.
You can learn a new skill on the job pretty fast.... just take away bullshit certifications, and burdensome regulations and people will learn fast. Spend 8 hours a day doing anything and you get it pretty fast... Also Cryptocurrency KIN is now paying people for completing online tasks.... so there is another avenue for value distribution
So if robots take over construction for example and building a new skyscraper cost half lol what do you think will happen? will be an insane boom in new construction and more jobs are created, people always want more!!!
it would be a waste too if there are no people to lease or buy property too. i would think robots would help lower costs all around, looking forward for house build robots especially in california which would cut costs dramatically, imagine? no need to worry about paying for healthcare or any benefits that you would normally have to spend for a human employee?
Why would more jobs be created? If you can do the same job at lower costs than work people why would you need people?
Naive.
@@spiffygonzales5899 you don't get it? If you need now 10 people to build a house and you would need 5 with robots, you would build many more homes, and eventually need even more employees, take for example automation we have now in laundry, making cars, clothes, we buy many more cars now, and look how many clothes people buy now compared to a hundred years ago, it's unnecessary alarmism, cheaper prices always leads to people buying more and creating more jobs...
That would be true if we still had population growth. Birth rates have been decreasing so unless we only have large cities and no longer rural areas then it could make sense.
A job that faces the same challenges? A job that someone can study the history of and then do? Bruh, you just described all jobs including your own. There isn't a single job on the planet that faces new and different challenges every single day, and which creates a job history so varied that no one could learn to do it. Such a job could never exist in a division of labor workforce.
In the US, I honestly do not see a 3 day weekend. I notice people working a lot, like more than 40 hours a week. Are we richer 🤔 I don’t feel people are richer. Car prices, home cost, and food costs haven’t gone down from my observation. Where is Antony getting his examples from? I suppose the rate of income isn’t keeping up with the rate of expenses 🤔
Huy Vuong google don Boudreaux the myth of wage stagnation
Why is the volume so low?
AI is a utility
The affirmative guy sounds like a reasonable guy - there will be challenges, it's not all bad, there is a definite lag between layoffs and retraining, people need purpose, capital is more important than labour than it has ever been, markets can help but are not the solution to everything. The Scottish guy is just a rambling, garbled, deluded mess.
Who cares about "employment". If technology frees more people to live the life of a simple homesteader I'm all for it! Who needs grocery stores and trucking when you can pick a fruit off your own tree
let's hope they do
Why so you can have your communist revolution?
@@JukeboxJake so we can be their employers
@@rodneyleon3645 what?
What are us dumb people going to do?
clean the robots. The dumb ppl already do stuff like that. The automated semi trucks coming require an operator to be in the truck
Be a pet?
Robots and ai will do the heavy lifting and down jobs so even idiots like you can perform them.
Invent something like the guys on youtube who walk around in public while there phone audibly announcess dumb shit people send to it, for money.
89% of men involved in the workforce, ever stop to think that the change down from 97% is at least in part do to it becoming socially acceptable for men to be homemakers? You also have people retiring while in their prime, that's not something that used to happen.
Only 6% of Men are stay-at-home workers. Thus the unemployment rate for men has increased 5% www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/24/stay-at-home-moms-and-dads-account-for-about-one-in-five-u-s-parents/#:~:text=The%20stay%2Dat%2Dhome%20share,about%20a%20quarter%2Dcentury%20earlier.
No
Welcome to the new normal. You've got some very relevant vids at the advent of CV..
Robots are not the cause of unemployment.
Constantly increasing the federal and state minimum wage is what causes unemployment. Low skill workers are pushed out of the market.
I don't know surely the lower paid jobs will be easily done with robots and AI but servicing said robots will become more important, and that education should be very mainstream and offer many jobs certainly lower than they'll take away but more in design and concept for the next generation of robots and on and on, there should always be an influx of jobs of engineers who want to maint and design robots, and they were always be a niche for cooking/service/customer service that a couple of humans can get into because it'll be different.
But many more people will need to learn better skills and we have to start teaching them, this problem is worst in locations where schooling is already dogshit because robots will take those jobs and they'll have nothing its important that in replacing these jobs the level of skill of humanity goes up alongside it, nobody who doesn't want to needs to be a fry cook anymore but like wise they'll need to be decent at robot maint or some other specialist field, and it'll certainly help in professions where nurses are used for human resource issues moving people around and making sure tasks are being completed when the robots can fill those odd jobs the nurses will be left to focus on their skills treating people, like wise teaching will become more important and its really strange we haven't made it more important.
Teaching the next generation is the most important thing we can do and we leave it to radical commies who don't bother to read history and people who only settle for the job? its a really horrid system we have that needs to be pushed up.. it needs to be an honor to teach it needs to pay better and the odd job bullshit needs to be taken away so teachers can focus on making sure students learn what they are required/want to.
a little respect from the kids there and some parental support would help immensely and would be totally free
What you are missing is that it will be AI that is designing and maintaining those robots. That is the whole point. Eventually AI and robotics will get to the point where they will be every bit as capable as humans at everything. What do we do then?
tldr;
it won't
Automation takes jobs, but it also creates jobs. People saw this during the industrial revolution of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In that period, western civilizations got thoroughly changed and reworked so that it resembled today's society, albeit with less advanced technology. People who used to work outside in the fields now worked inside factories. Sure there was mass unemployment, but it didn't last long. This transformation of western societies from backwards agrarian systems with literally medieval technology into advanced industrial ones with lots of mod cons lead to vast improvements in people's lives. Now, someone in the lower middle class in a developed country has more comforts and lives longer than the average ancient emporer or medieval monarch!
An artificial intelligence singularity would have a similar effect. It would result in a better situation than during the original industrial revolution. Radical life extension or even immortality of some kind, great civilian access to outer space, space colonization, etc, all may come true with AI.
IT creates them? Maybe a few coders, MAYBE
So we are good until 10 years?
A life without meaningful work is a life without meaning and dignity. What is sad, and Jordan Peterson speaks on this a lot. That the portion of the population with low IQs will struggle to find work in the future. I do not believe that taking taxing companies (which is impossible, companies don't pay any tax. The end user does.) and handing out cash monthly to people is the solution. I do think there will always be a market demand for human service, and human made products. Two examples, I don't want to spend 100 bucks on dinner to have it made and served by a robot (personally I hate those little tablets you find on a lot of the tables of chain restaurants, they have no place on a dining room table.). If there wasn't a demand for handmade goods the Amish wouldn't sell any hand made furniture. There is no doubt that more automation will reduce the cost of living, it has been true for hundreds of years.
I agree. On top of that, they people who own the businesses (and thus majority of the wealth) will hire lobbyists or pay politicians to stop universal basic income laws because it is significantly cheaper than actually paying those high taxes. Yet, most of the non-niche categories will be lost to automation. Thus there will be a large push into entrepreneurship as their is no job stability anymore.
2:40 false dichotomy anyone?
Maybe robots will make money for us by law of ownership robots could be the next slaves
First Gen slaves?
Corporate interests will hog it all
@@asianmovement that's why there should be some sort of law to prevent that, to protect the citizens, we must fight for our rights.
Maybe we will own vending machines and laundrymats one day
How will the poor buy a robot?
If the robots get that smart they'll keep us employed to stop us smashing them up lol
"Maybe unemployment is invisible and that's why I'm right". Great argument right there.
This is absurd , why are they wasting time debating when theres nothing to debate since the matter is long settled - we manufacture more in dollar terms than ever yet at the same time, infinitely less ppl work in the factories that make those products than 50 yrs ago . And if you think those ppl that lost jobs at the factories readjusted with new equally well-paid jobs thanks to this so-called creative destruction - then just visit former industrial behemoth towns like St. Louis , Dayton , Eerie, Cleveland, etc & you’ll see that it’s just destruction that was brought upon those cities when the factories became automated , destruction evidenced by the those cities’ high rates of poverty, unemployment , & suicides .
It looks like Martin Ford is completely clueless on economics (history and analysis). Just the fact that he mentions climate change as something to fear makes him un-scientific to me. On top of all this, he thinks that universal basic income is a great solution and promotes Andrew Yang as a guru of this solution: the same guy that did not show up to this debate. A bit pathetic as a debater and seems to have been running out of arguments very early in the debate if you ask me.
“The lowering of prices across the whole economy is s disaster...” This confirms my theory: MF is a total ignorant of basic sound economics.
Wrong. Work creates a sense of purpose. It doesn't just exist to provide for external wants and needs. Work is in and of itself a need. Most humans are biologically wired for the effort, struggle, and routine of work. Work for the sake of work is a thing, and we must come to grips with that. An increase in the number of people lacking in a sense of purpose will necessarily lead to increased mental illness and destructive tendencies, and this trend is already revealing itself.
Work will always exist though, partly because differences between individuals and groups will always cause differences in needs and wants that will disrupt existing systems, and those disruptions will require some form of work to overcome them. The winners and losers of opposing wills always will guarantee the existence of work.
gay
I find no problem making work even though I have a real job. I'd rather not do my real job.
@@MilwaukeeF40C
Whichever way you provide value exchange with others is work or a 'real' job. If what you call "work" is simply busying yourself to distract from reality, that is unlikely to lead to a real sense of purpose. If what you prefer to do actually provides value to others and gives you a greater sense of purpose than your "real" job, then maybe pursue that end instead. However, the real issue here may be dissatisfaction with status. The lack of status provided by one's paying job can lead people to believe that they would prefer to do something else that they imagine will provide a greater degree of status. But imaginary status is only a distraction, and pursuit of that alone will lead only to disappointment. Efficiently providing value exchange to others will definitely lead to a degree of higher status than simple dreaming, though maybe never the kind of status society promotes as the end all be all. Today's society puts too much emphasis on status and too little on providing value, which is extremely destructive, since status is always relative and for the few, but value exchange is for everyone.
Recently renegotiated trade agreements have helped with lowering unemployment. Liberal policies will have the government employing us all.
If there are masses (1/3 of population) of people permanently put out of work by future automation, why wouldn't those people form their own economy (just like current and past economies)? I mean, if a robot plumber takes my plumbing job, why wouldn't I sell plumbing services to a similarly affected doctor in exchange for her services?
Because you'd have to still pay them at a rate higher than the automated Doctor but for a lower quality service.
@@iraholden3606 @@iraholden3606 So you think the unemployed human doctors would all be so proud that they would rather starve to death than take a pay cut?
I wish automation made people richer by default. Sadly entire towns are already being left behind. UBI will fix this. #yang2020
No, it won't. It will devalue the currency and work while increasing unemployment. Then the whole economy collapses. Been tried before, didn't work, never will.
@@sujimayne It's not socialism. It's capitalism that doesn't start at 0. UBI studies show that it doesn't cause inflation and Yang's UBI plan doesn't print any money.
It will actually create jobs cause people can start businesses in their dying towns as people have money to spend it locally.
Get govt regulation out of our way and the markets will adjust, new jobs we never thought of will arise out of thin air and things will keep churning like always. Get the government meddling in things and all the doomsday prophecies about automation and AI will come true
Martin Ford has the high ground. And why the Scottish bro looks and sounds like he just betrayed William Wallace.