49 Comments

Robin, I'm reading your blog posts in reverse chronological order.

This post is from about 2 years ago; I'm writing in June 2017. I haven't crunched the numbers, but from recent valuations I would expect that the tech sector has recently grabbed a much larger share of the stock market pie. Do you think there's evidence for a tech bubble right now?

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"Death comes first."

If that turns out to be true, it doesn't have to be the culling of existing individuals. For example, poor people could be paid not to have children and then eventually die of old age.

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If automation happens, it could increase wages and create new jobs. This should happen if human labor is a bottleneck for economic growth, rather than other constraints like energy, space or raw materials.

Since there's lots of unused raw materials, space and energy in the Sol system, and to a lesser degree even still on Earth, this is a plausible enough conjecture.

As long as human beings have any comparative advantage over machines in some fields, their wages should increase in those fields even as wages in automated fields fall, as total growth increases.

What comparative advantage may humans have in such an economy? Human attention, relative social status, sex, possibly some religious or philosophical alignment displays. The question is, will there be enough innovation in these markets, and will governments allow them to operate freely?

Of course, in such a growth scenario, small percentages of redistribution and charity could support many more people even if they have no comparative advantage. However, I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon.

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"This analysis is spot-on and is a badly needed antidote to all of the silly posturing I see on facebook about how automation is about to eliminate all of the jobs."

Well, I don't do silly posturing on Facebook (or anywhere else). But my blog does contain a prediction that approximately half of the top 15 jobs in 2012 will be gone by 2044, due to computer intelligence. In particular danger I think are tractor trailer truck drivers (>90% reduction), cashiers (~90% reduction), and material movers (e.g. loading dock workers...>85% reduction).

"You would expect investors to pour their money into the companies responsible for the automation."

The company with the 2nd largest market capitalization in the world, Google, is gobbling up robotics companies.

"Either the argument that automation is about to eliminate most jobs is a load of unsubstantiated hype or that the vast majority of students and investors believe it to be a load of hype (or vaporware, as we say in the industry)."I think the more likely is that automation is going to eliminate very many jobs, but 10-30 years into the future...and most students and investors don't look 10-30 years into the future.

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I get a lot of postings on my facebook page from those claiming to be "transhumanists" but who are really leftists advocating for some variant of the dole (universal basic income schemes). Most of these postings argue on the basis that automation and robotics will eliminate most jobs for humans.

I really need to clean up my facebook page.

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This analysis is spot-on and is a badly needed antidote to all of the silly posturing I see on facebook about how automation is about to eliminate all of the jobs.

I'm out of the Facebook loop. What image or program are automation doomsayers promoting? (It's not, I wouldn't think, exactly what gets called an sjw agenda.) What are they posturing as?

[Who are the main parties to this tug of war?]

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This analysis is spot-on and is a badly needed antidote to all of the silly posturing I see on facebook about how automation is about to eliminate all of the jobs. You would expect investors to pour their money into the companies responsible for the automation. Largely, they are not. Young people would also be more into pursuing careers in real engineering fields as well as computer science/IT. Again, this appears not to be the case.

Either the argument that automation is about to eliminate most jobs is a load of unsubstantiated hype or that the vast majority of students and investors believe it to be a load of hype (or vaporware, as we say in the industry).

It is issues such as this is why the idea of betting markets as a replacement for talking head pundits is such a brilliant idea. People who make predictions and pontificate on the basis of those predictions should be willing to bet their money on their predictions. People unwilling to do so make clear they have no personal conviction in the kind of rhetoric they spew forth, and can be safely ignored.

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"It was easier to find interesting books at Borders Ann Arbor than today at Amazon. Disagree?"Oh, I agree. But Ann Arbor is hardly what I'd call a "typical" city. I worked in downtown Detroit for a year (back when the first Back to the Future came out :-)). One weekend I went to Ann Arbor (I think partially to go to the UM library). I saw a city of 100,000+ people, pretty densely populated, almost entirely by well-educated people in their late teens and early twenties. From that very striking impression, I'd say if a brick-and-mortar bookstore can't make it in Ann Arbor, it basically can't make it anywhere in the world. And even then...I think if Amazon really tried to create a "bookstore experience" with a website, they could. Already, they recommend books based on whatever other books a person has looked at or bought. (I'm sure brick-and-mortar Borders could do that too, but do they?)P.S. About the only books I buy are far-from-mainstream stuff like Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation...which I see is available at Amazon for $0.01 (plus $3.99 S+H). How can brick-and-mortar Borders compete with that? Especially when computerized book depositories and computer-driven vehicles will cut the S+H charges in half?

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Well I *do* agree that there was a long-term relative increase. (Also that the graph is more than a bit hard to read, for this purpose:-)

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It was easier to find interesting books at Borders Ann Arbor than today at Amazon. Disagree?

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"Shopping offline is much easier than online for anything that requires immersive information and that won't change this century."What are some examples of things that require "immersive information," and what percentage of store sales do you think require that "immersive information"?I'll counter that the items most people would say most require a brick-and-mortar store...such as clothes and shoes...are actually much better handled by a fully autonomous vehicle delivery system, wherein customers receive several sizes to try at home, and return the unwanted items.Even with current technology, I'm pretty sure somebody on the order of Google/Amazon/Walmart/Target could set up a "virtual store" that could be navigated much like Google Earth Street View (though hopefully in a more intuitive manner!), and displayed on a big-screen LED TV. Technology like Oculus Rift would probably be even cooler for virtual shopping.

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"Care to offer concrete bets corresponding to your "likely" claim?"

Sure.

1) Contingent upon 80+% of the vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. in 30 years being by fully automated ("Level 5")*** vehicles, I'll bet up to $100 that 80+% of the brick-and-mortar Walmart and Target stores will have been shut down or repurposed to be warehouses (rather than retail establishments wherein people come to the store to buy things).

But in 30 years, I'll be over 85, so...

2) Contingent upon 50+% of the vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. in 20 years being by Level 5 automation, I'll bet up to $100 that 40+% of the Walmart and Target stores will have been shut down or repurposed.

Per Walmart's website, as of August 31, 2015, they had 5,249 stores in the U.S.

Per Target's website, they had 1793 stores at the end of 2013. So let's say it's at about 1810 stores today. P.S. ***My previous comment stated that Level 4 was fully autonomous. But it's Level 5 that's fully autonomous.

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That is not remotely a "typical" attribution among economists.

Point taken.

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Gee, I don't know why we bothered reading this article bringing together evidence for one side of this disputed question when we could have just asked entirelyuseless whether it was clear or not.

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No, not retail. Shopping offline is much easier than online for anything that requires immersive information and that won't change this century. We haven't begun to replace anything other than visual and textual information. Non shopping, that is, refilling of existing orders, online can be made to work but is hardly worth the effort.

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Care to offer concrete bets corresponding to your "likely" claim?

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