What Do We Want?

There's been a lot of back-and-forth over whether or not the widespread adoption of generative automation is going to usher in a new golden age or simply detonate the employment market. What tends to be left out of these discussions, at least as I encounter them, is any mention of aggregate demand. And that seems like an oversight, because the question at hand can usually be boiled down to "How much demand will new automation technologies create (or destroy) and how much of it will it be able to meet itself?"

Because the problem isn't automation per se... it's the fact that there isn't pent-up demand for human labor waiting to take up all of the slack in the labor market. And while people predict that demand is coming, no one has any idea when it might happen, considering that people are still saying "automation could create new jobs people haven't even thought of yet." I think that part of the problem is that new occupations are seen as purely emergent phenomena that simply come along at random one day, so there's no point in attempting to actively bring them about. Which may be true, but new occupations come along to meet new needs. And while some things will always be a surprise, it's possible to predict certain needs a few years or so in advance. This is, after all, how the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts together its "Fastest Growing Occupations" list. In other words, the fact that people may be unable to design the future they want isn't a reason to not be attempting to get out in front of it.

The problem with both the doom-and-gloom and techno-optimist camps is that their outlooks tend to be passive; either there's nothing to be done, or a solution will magically appear where it's least expected. Even the people who are talking up (or selling) ways for people to future-proof themselves against a more automated future are dealing in individual preparation for an inevitable outcome.

But human history is created by, well, people. As a species, we're the ones driving, rather than simply being along for the ride. There's no need to be resigned to a "wait, and see what develops" mindset. But it's going to take some doing. But the difficult thing about it is that it's going to take working together in a situation where the temptation to do better for oneself by jumping ship is going to be high.

Beyond Valuation

It's been said that people only value things when they are, or have been, uncertain that they could actually attain them. And I think that this explains a lot about the way the modern United States works. For most Americans, the resources to build material affluence are uncertain. Circumstances change and what seemed secure one day can vanish the next. But human resources, and human potential, are so common as to be seen as free for the asking. Human capital, as it were, is overwhelmingly abundant, and that shows no sign of changing.

The United States has a rate of preventable deaths that's been calculated to be about 840 people per 100,000, and while there are initiatives to lower that, as a matter of public health, I've never heard it mentioned as an unaffordable loss of needed manpower. The deaths are a humanitarian tragedy, not an economic one.

I remember the economic boom brought about by the rapid expansion of Internet technologies into modern life, and here in the Seattle area, it caused genuine labor shortages. Restaurants had to work hard, and offer bonuses, in order to attract people to work in them, and a few that I can think of closed because they couldn't manage it. Tech companies came across as being desperate for workers, and demonstrating that one had any sort of aptitude for the work was enough to land one a decently-paying job. Now, those days are past. But even at the time, this was not a phenomenon that was spread equally around the nation as a whole. There were still depressed parts of the United States at the time, where there were more people than there was a need for labor. Technology companies may have been vacuuming up anyone who would stand still within sight of a Human Resources employee, but the unemployment rate was never at risk of dropping to zero.

For all that demographers, economists and, in some quarters, racists look at the current birth trends and foresee a future with too few people entering the labor market, the fact of the matter is that we're not making use of all of the people that who are available to work in the present. Leaving aside those who are simply unemployed, there are significant numbers of people who are underemployed, or simply not able to contribute to their full potential.

And that's unlikely to change until people really need it to. The United States, as a matter of cultural tradition, preaches a message that it up to the individual to gain the knowledge, and put in the effort, to make their best contribution to the society as a whole. When a society genuinely needs its people to get out there and make things better, it doesn't leave it up to chance like that.

You Say

Recently, large-scale layoffs at Microsoft have been the talk of the town, mainly because they've done quite a bit to erode people's confidence in the direction of the economy. The Trump Administration's haphazard tariff proclamations are unlikely to restore the high-wage jobs that are being shed, because they're not going overseas; they're simply being swept aside to make room for new technology.

When I was laid off from Microsoft just over six years ago, that's how I described it; I had been laid off from Microsoft. But now, a different way of talking about these things has emerged, with people referring to themselves as having been impacted by the layoffs.

I find it an interesting wording, because it makes the layoffs come across as a separate thing from what's actually happening to people. The layoff moves from an effect to a cause. And the loss of jobs is merely one of the effects of that cause. Whether it softens the blow, or this is simply people mirroring the way the company itself describes the events in question, I don't know. But I suspect that if this trend continues, it's going to lead to a change in the way people see both themselves and their jobs/careers.

And perhaps that's the point. While a lot of corporation-speak tends to strike me as essentially emergent, perhaps this particular turn of phrase is a matter of design. Language does, after all, shape the way people look at the world around them.

Time Travel

Spent the day at a local Renaissance Faire. This is the sort of thing that I did a lot of when I was young, but ad sort of drifted away from. I'm an old man now, so it's more tiring that it used to be, but it was an enjoyable time.
 

Rolling the Line

In early August of 2013, Seattle taxi drivers slow-rolled their way through downtown in an act of protest, hoping to pressure the Seattle City Council to, basically, enforce the law on Uber and Lyft, which they saw as a threat to their livelihoods. We all understand how it turned out. The taxi drivers could hold up downtown traffic, but no-one could hold back the tide.

But the problem that the taxi drivers had wasn't really the technology. By the time this protest happened, Uber's practice of evading, or simply ignoring, local laws and regulations was pretty well known, although the proof, in the form of a batch of leaked company documents, wouldn't come to light for years. The simple fact of the matter was that many people didn't care; they liked the lower prices and ease of use that ride sharing applications offered, and that was more important to them than whether or not the rules were being followed.

The fundamental disunity of the United States results in a lot of situations like this, where people are protesting what they think they have the most (or any) control over, even when that's different than the actual problem at hand.