- Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.
“Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject; The Luddites were wrong and the believers in technology and technological progress were right,” Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary and presidential economic adviser, said in a lecture at the National Bureau of Economic Research five years ago. “I’m not so completely certain now.”
I feel a bit torn on the subject of automation. There seems to be a very long list of boring, dangerous and demanding tasks that I can see becominig automated in the coming decade or two. Matter of fact, I have been busy the last weeks with automating a bunch of repetitive webapp tasks that can be fully automated with a REST API. It'll almost save my company (so, me and the four colleagues now doing this work manually) months of dull manual work in the coming years and I'm all the happier for it, since we can then use our hours to do more interesting, value-adding work. So I tend to extrapolate that experience to the bigger scale - automation will free us from the tasks we don't have to do so we have more room to tackle the bigger, more difficult issues. But I am also very aware of the problem that it's very often not the same person that gets to do the new, more interesting thing. My experience may be good for me, but the average automation case is that a dozen low-skilled workers are replaced by one higher-skilled worker, and that nobody gives a crap about those that are left behind. Retraining only gets you so far - who's gonna hire the 50-year old retrained-but-unexperienced worker over the cheaper younger person, for example? I don't know if this already happened on your side of the Atlantic, but I see more and more fast food chains doing away with people behind the counter for orders, and having instead large touch-screen based ordering. Still don't know if I should cheer that on or not.
Not only that, but the older someone gets the more obstacles there are to overcome. Ageism being the first to come to mind, but there might be other problems as well such as work restrictions due to old injuries, poor credit score, previous run ins with the law. All of these add up and can greatly diminish a person's chances of finding new employment. Just by playing the odds game, the older someone gets the more likely they're going to have issues like these happen in their lifetime. The common narrative here in The States is that jobs such as fast food or retail aren't "good jobs." They don't pay well, there's not a lot of room for advancement, the skills learned don't necessarily transfer to other industries, what have you. Therefore their loss shouldn't be mourned. The flip side of that coin is though, those jobs help put food on the table, a roof over your head, and a reason to wake up in the morning. Even if the wages might be inadequate, all of those things are arguably good. If we take those jobs away, replace them with automation, and don't offer any safety nets for the people who've jobs are lost, aren't we essentially robbing the world of the goodness of food, shelter, and purpose? Additionally, what kind of message do you think the world is sending these people when all it takes is a $200 tablet to threaten their ability to be employed? How do you think they can end up seeing themselves, both as individuals and as members of society?Retraining only gets you so far - who's gonna hire the 50-year old retrained-but-unexperienced worker over the cheaper younger person, for example?
I don't know if this already happened on your side of the Atlantic, but I see more and more fast food chains doing away with people behind the counter for orders, and having instead large touch-screen based ordering. Still don't know if I should cheer that on or not.
To my understanding this article is touching on the benefits of automation not being evenly distributed in society. In an ideal world I think it's possible to benefit society as a whole through automation. I have doubts this will be the trend anytime soon, but taking the profitability of machines and sharing it across all sectors is the way to go. In other words taxing the use of automation and using that money for universal pay or subsidizing industries where automation can't help. I do agree that currently that is not the trend at all and we have companies like Google sitting on billions of dollars, employing a very small subset of people. This would also not fly anytime soon in non progressive countries, although the idea of universal pay has been approached in many progressive countries already. We are probably in for some harder times before things improve.
Having read three studies on automation - one from 1962, one from 2017 and one from 2018 - they all say the same things: 1) Re-education is the key to distributing the gains of automation 2) Nobody is going to pay for re-education. Taxing automation is going to be (rightly) seen as an anticompetitive measure. 
I agree that in the current landscape in the US atleast, it is seen as anti competitive. Just like universal healthcare. No change will be happening there any time soon. My point was aimed at further into the future, the prospect of automation benefiting humanity. Norway did this with its oil reserves over the last 30 years. They have enough money now in their treasury to make every citizen a millionaire. As current trends continue, what's going to happen? Those that control/have automation will acquire even more disproportionate amounts of total wealth. Regulating (taxing) automation could lead to better distribution of wealth. Not everyone's meant to be an engineer, and since non technical jobs might be taken by automation, these same people could do other things like paint or juggle or what ever. Universal income could help them, we would have more art and non commercial entertainment in society. Important societal roles such as teachers and senior care workers could benefit through better pay and quality of life for those who choose to take these roles. Not trying to disagree with capitalism, just giving an opinion on the possibility for automation to be a good thing that improves the lives of most people, counter to the article. I agree that my views would not work in the US today.
I'm a fan of automation. I'm a fan of re-education. I made an impassioned plea not six months ago to a board of directors to focus more on programming than machine operating. But I also know that the basic problem is that old jobs are being destroyed and new jobs are being created and that the shortest pathway to healing is re-education. "Universal healthcare" is misunderstood. I own a business in the health care industry and I think medicare-for-all is so much closer than anybody really understands. I'm reasonably certain it'll be a reality in two years. It doesn't hurt anyone's ability to work and it doesn't immediately impact anyone's profits. That's not the case with universal income - you're talking about taking a substantial portion of the economy and arguing it can come from taxation. It's all gonna work out in the end. But the Luddites are going to go from skilled craftsmen to hardscrabble beggars making matches in someone else's flophouse. That's not how I want it, it's just what rhymes with history.
Coded, automated tasks have fundamental gaps in their execution. They will always be limited by the fundamental limits of the code powering them. A lot of my work addresses gaps created by systems that were supposed to automate everything and solve problems. Tech has a fundamental arrogance towards what it does, mostly because people don't like to pay attention the details or the consequences of ignoring them.
Being a little bit arrogant is necessary. We used to joke about being able to replace managers with very small perl scripts, but most of what we do really is looking at the things people do under the assumption we can figure out the rules for the games they're playing and write programs to play them instead. That's fundamentally arrogant, but it works pretty well when it works. If we were modest a computer would still be an office worker with a ream of scratch paper. What we need is for everyone, including us, to understand that and take us with a few shakers of salt.
95% of most jobs can be done by 95% of people. It's that last 5% of the time that you need expertise. The issue is that efficiency experts will look at that statistic and determine you can have 95% proficiency by offering expertise early retirement... without considering that takeoffs and landings are a small percentage of an aircraft's flight time.