Really great & long article over at the New Yorker
For decades, the conventional view among economists was that technological advances create as many opportunities for workers as they take away. In the past several years, however, research has begun to suggest otherwise. “It’s not that we’re running out of work or jobs per se,” David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who studies the impact of automation on employment, said. “But a subset of people with low skill levels may not be able to earn a reasonable standard of living based on their labor. We see that already.”
For people who have technical degrees and can manage automated systems, and for owners of companies that are in the process of automating, the potential for increased wealth is significant. But for less skilled workers it’s a different story. In a paper from earlier this year, the economists Daron Acemoglu, of M.I.T., and Pascual Restrepo, of Boston University, studied local job markets in the United States between 1990 and 2007, and they found that the concentration of industrial robots in an area was directly related to a decline in jobs and in pay.
If you think about it, it makes sense, partly because the entire concept of labor as we know it is sort of a social construct anyhow. There’s no organic, natural, or inevitable reason for people to punch a time clock and throw levers and screw on bolts and stuff in order for someone to sell a ton of widgets. There were natural, organic, and inevitable needs for people to do stuff like grow food, hunt food, turn said food-bearing animals into clothes, etc. The New Yorker also had an article from last month, maybe, or perhaps August (read it in a waiting room somewhere) talking about how what we often call civilization–sedentary society based on agriculture–was more disaster than boon for most people, as it was pretty much an institution designed to support a powerful elite via taxes on crops. In some ways, by creating a system where what you need is divorced from what you do, with cash as wages in the middle, we’ve done the same thing. And once you separate what you do from what you need, the man in the middle controls you.
So, yeah, as all organized industry of any sort exists solely to produce wealth for the owners, it should come as no surprise that when given the chance robots are the workers of choice. At least until they go all SkyNet on us.
I read the New Yorker article too, and it did make the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors seem idyllic. But it ignores the fact that the carrying capacity of the planet inhabited by hunter-gatherers was less than 1% of what it is now; the population was controlled by starvation, misfortune and violent death at the hands of rival bands competing for hunting grounds (I.e., warfare).
Sure, and I think the point of the article, for me, was not so much that hunter gatherer land was peachy but that civilization isn’t quite the uncontested boon it’s often made out to be. All the things you describe as the bane of hunter-gatherer existence are also present, in different forms perhaps, after sedentary agriculture, or at least, their equivalents–plague, deliberate genocide, organized warfare, poverty, etc.
I think the key thing for me is the argument that civilization as we describe it wasn’t something that was inevitable, but rather something that was encouraged for a variety of reasons, but largely by people who benefited the most from it and those people were not the masses.
Of course, it helps that when things are going well, sedentary, agricultural, organized societies can make daily life better for a fair number of people. It’s when things take a turn for the worse that the true colors get shown.
My point is that in non-agricultural people, death from violence and starvation under normal circumstances is about 25%. In the modern world, populations only hit that during severe wars, plagues and famines.
And my point is that you can’t measure social success solely by mortality rates, though I agree that’s a good starting point. The price for lower mortality rates has been pretty high across the board, especially for those who are not among the elite. But yes, people live longer and have less chance of random death in organized societies–largely because it’s in the interest of the leaders of said societies to keep the work force alive. It sure isn’t out of altruism.
I see the point of the whole discussion raised by that article as simply challenging the notion that “civilization” is something that has no downsides, and that was an unmitigated blessing. Hey, I like the Internet and indoor plumbing too, don’t get me wrong. But not everyone benefits equally from “civilization.”
