What else can you believe when there's evidence that the loss of jobs is not really about the economy?
Since the Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 G.D.P., equipment investment, and total corporate profits have rebounded, and are now at their all-time highs. The employment ratio, meanwhile, has only shrunk and is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s when women had not yet entered the workforce in significant numbers. So current labor force woes are not because the economy isn’t growing, and they’re not because companies aren’t making money or spending money on equipment. They’re because these trends have become increasingly decoupled from hiring — from needing more human workers. As computers race ahead, acquiring more and more skills in pattern matching, communication, perception, and so on, I expect that this decoupling will continue, and maybe even accelerate. ...Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at M.I.T.’s Center for Digital Business, quoted in the New York Times
Andrew McAfee and his colleague, Erik Brynjolfsson have been researching "the race against the machine.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee have a list of 19 proposals that they support — which range from massive investment in education, infrastructure and basic research, to lowering barriers to business creation, eliminating the mortgage interest deduction and changing copyright and patent law to encourage new (as opposed to protecting old) innovations.
Any effort to ameliorate the damaging consequences to the employment marketplace stemming from technological innovation, according to Brynjolfsson, requires substantial government action at a time when “the political system is the most dysfunctional part of our society.”
McAfee and Brynjolfsson argue that in a race against machines, humans will lose. In their view, “the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.” The question, then, will be whether humans can adapt at anywhere near the pace needed to keep up. ...NYT
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Think about how one clever little machine and software designers are putting untold numbers of workers out of a job. Some excerpts from a report on NPR the other day:
JON KALISH, BYLINE: Sean Hurley works for a software company called Autodesk. Not long ago the door on his clothes dryer at home developed a problem. It wouldn't stay shut, which made it impossible to use the dryer.
SEAN HURLEY: The little clip when you shut the door that locks it is just a half-inch flat little piece of plastic with a little channel it. That's all it was. Thirty-nine bucks.
KALISH: Yep, 39 bucks to replace a little piece of plastic. So Hurley used his computer to design the part and then made it on a 3-D printer. Problem solved. Hurley knew how to do this because he knows how to use software to make a 3-D model. But for those of us who don't have that kind of computer chops, Hurley's company makes free software that fills in the gap.
HURLEY: 123D Catch allows somebody to use a regular camera and capture photos that generate a 3-D model. It's kinda like magic.
KALISH: And if even that seems too involved, there are now multiple sites on the Internet that offer free 3-D models for a variety of consumer items. For example, if the headband on your headphones breaks, you can have a new one printed from one of these free files. And more and more of these files are being made available every day.
New Yorker Duann Scott had one of those pricey Bugaboo baby strollers. When a part in the locking mechanism broke he was told it would cost $250 to fix it. Scott spent all of five minutes creating a 3-D model of the broken plastic part and had it printed in a stronger material: stainless steel. The cost: $25.DUANN SCOTT: It came back just under two weeks later and I put it in the stroller and it worked straight away. And I documented it so that anybody could fix their stroller using my experience. And I made the three files available for download for free so anyone else can repair it. And I don't get any money from it. I just want people to fix their stroller in the same way I could. ...NPR
