[p2p-research] Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING

[Ryan Lanham]

On 12/10/09, Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/9/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>
> >  Marshall Brain was the first person I read who was really explicit, step
> by
> > step, about the link between automation and joblessness at all levels,
> > especially in Manna. It had been said before for a long time, but he
> really
> > seemed especially clear about it. And he makes clear an economic link in
> the
> > sidebar here, written around 2002:
> >   http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
> >  """
> >  The "Jobless Recovery" that we are currently experiencing in the U.S. is
> > big news. See for example The Mystery of the 'jobless recovery':
> >   "Consider these facts: Employment growth at the moment is the lowest
> for
> > any recovery since the government started keeping such statistics in
> 1939.
> > The labor force shrank in July as discouraged workers stopped seeking
> > employment. The number of people employed has fallen by more than 1
> million
> > since the "recovery" began in the fall of 2001." [ref]
>
> Paul, as interesting and well-argued as your posts on the subject are,
> I'm afraid I'm extremely skeptical that automation is the primary
> reason for the jobless recovery, or that that will be a primary cause
> of structural unemployment in the near term.
>
> For one thing, replacing humans with industrial robots is the kind of
> expensive, capital-intensive investment that the old mass-production
> industrial core was prone to in its heyday.


I disagree completely.  Productivity has been wiping out jobs for some
time.  Whether the variable term "robotics" has any meaning on the topic is
debatable, but not so much in Detroit.  Robotics in the AGI sense is still
10-20 years off.  I can say that in my field, workforce development, it
isn't even controversial.  There is less work than there is economic
capacity to do it.  Always has been...and it is getting worse.  It will get
much worse.

Our workforce here has exploded with unskilled labor in areas like house
helpers.  But people don't want them...just as they didn't in South Africa
when I was there.  Do you think people will choose a human who carries
germs, has an attitude, needs help when sick, etc. to load their washing
machine when they can spend 10,000 USD for a robot to do it?  It won't be
close.  People will always choose automation...just as businesses have.
Automation doesn't form unions, doesn't call in sick, doesn't need
retraining, and has a consistent measureable level of quality and output
that can generally be improved.

The more basic and simple problem is that people cannot consume what we can
make under any economic model that makes even the remotest sense in market
terms.  It is, I believe, why we have invented the super-rich again.  Their
capacity to consume and waste is simply necessary for capital to work.

Just look at farming where one or 2% of the population over-produces demand
easily...and 2% is down from 90%.  Imagine industrialized production coming
online in Africa which is far more fertile and has much longer and better
growing seasons than nearby Europe.

Why would that change in other fields?  The real controversy is that people
thought there was infinite economic demand.  There isn't.  Japan is proving
that decisively...2x their GDP in stimulus has pushed a rope.  There is no
uptake.  Even with the explosive consumerism in Europe and the US in recent
years, there is no prospect of ever really de-leveraging consumer and small
business debt (certainly not in our lifetimes).  Thus demand will again be
stagnant for at least 10-30 years.  It was the libertarian market guys who
got the world wholly wrong.  They destroyed us.

Even still, we deliberately kept the developing world developing so as to
avoid their labor influx to a low-demand world.  Now we have the technology
to improve productivity without unskilled labor.

If you wish to starve in the future, have skills that have no economic
meaning.  Your choice.  Governments are no longer able to carry the weak.
So, we are essentially returning to something like Russia in 1916.  There
are vast numbers of useless people.  Something must be done...either they
gain power (which has never worked before) or they are eliminated (which is
gruesome but works) or there is a third way.  I vote for the third way...

The end of any project of scarcity is always increasing scarcity and social
collapse.  With technology and market knowledge, it is impossible to
maintain scarcity in balance with workforce at a level that maintains social
stability.  Thus, abundance theory isn't an interesting take on information
fields, it is an essential political philosophy of the future that breaks
with the now long-obsolete thoughts of the 19th and 18th centuries.

Ryan
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