[ExI] undercover at Walmart

[Tom Nowell]

Brian Atkins wrote:

"Bill, there is nothing magical and wonderful about "making stuff" any more than there was about being a farm worker in the 19th century.

"Making stuff" is well on its way to being highly automated and/or shifted to other means of cheaper and more efficient production (China, etc.) just as farming did previously.

For anyone affected by this, it's time to find other kinds of jobs, not pine wistfully for a reversion back to the "golden old days"."

Well, there is something magical and wonderful about being a 19th century farmworker or somebody who makes stuff. It is obvious exactly where you are adding value. Farmworker - plants or animals plus land plus weather conditions plus your labour equals food. You can see the value. Likewise making stuff you can see the materials and the finished product and marvel at the labour which produced it. It is easy to put a value on this labour and see where value has been added.

Now, determining how much value has been added in the service industries is a tricky business which vexes accountants. Politicians favouring tax cuts like to point to taxpayer-funded jobs whose value is very hard to determine, and say they are in favour of cutting these jobs.

If all physical labour (farm or factory) can be highly automated, then the main sources of employment are offering knowledge-based services and offering services which are better delivered with a human touch than impersonally.

However, if AI technology can start replacing some of the knowledge-based jobs and robots get better delivering personal services, then what's left for people to work in?

In the long run, it will come down to how we want society to function - do we want everybody working furiously in an orgy of overproduction, terrified that if their productivity drops they will be out of work and hungry, or do we want to share around the huge productivity we can attain? You see in those old "visions of the future" books the idea of everyone only working a 20 hour week because robots have taken away half the working day. These days, we work as many hours as we can and consume twice as much stuff as was predicted.

Now, there are people on this list who will argue that one day we will all be uploaded and considerations of the physical substrate will seem silly, or that one day with a 3D printer in every home and a personal AI for everyone, all questions of scarcity will be gone. There are still decades of transition in between those end-states, and we have to think about how to minimise the suffering during these coming decades.

Tom