Should We Blame Technology for High Unemployment?

[dkf]

http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp111026should_we_blame_tech

From farms to factories, and now to the service economy, human workers are losing their jobs to machines. The "creative destruction" that used to increase employment is working the other way around, and productivity is on the rise. As computers become more sophisticated, how can humans learn to compete?

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Very very interesting show on where technology is going and how it will displace workers.

http://cdn07.castfire.com/audio/55/230/663/767705/tp_2011-10-26-165005-119-0-0-0.64.mp3?cdn_id=7&uuid=3ac50d48d936f52d6e5e2244361fd3d5&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kcrw.com%2Fnews%2Fprograms%2Ftp%2Ftp111026should_we_blame_tech

[leftstreet]

1. If we owned the means of production we'd be having a different conversation about 'unemployment' n/t

[dkf]

2. That is something we need to contemplate.

As robots and AI get more sophisticated, there are so many jobs that will be replaced and once it starts, it will spread pretty fast.

They actually discuss this a little at the end, that the idea of labor as the source of income may need to change. It's an eye opening piece.

[Laluchacontinua]

11. Um, how do the capitalists propose to make profits if everything is done by machines?

They can't sell whatever the machines make to machines.

So if you;re talking about a machine society you're talking about the end of capitalism.

[cherokeeprogressive]

3. In 1980-1 I painted cars at the GM plant in South Gate, CA.

We didn't actually paint the whole car; we painted underneath the hood, the core support (what the radiator is bolted to), A, B, and C pillars, door jambs, and inside the trunks. All other horizontal/vertical surfaces were painted by robots. That in itself was a change from the way things were done a decade before...

Now if you see what happens when a car body goes into a paint booth, there are no humans present.

I was fascinated when I used to walk the plant during my breaks. The unibodies were welded together by robots that looked like birds. Before that they were welded by people.

So in a word... Yeah.

[shraby]

4. I saw the handwriting on the wall when the steel companies

closed. Also saw some more writing when they brought the huge huge trees that were knocked down by Mt. St. Helens down to the Port of Olympia and we found out they were headed for Japan because we didn't have large enough saws in the mills here.

Read about people getting more schooling in Reagan's time because of all the lay-offs so they would be able to start a new career..their jobs were leaving the country.

I guess what went around is here again with people trying to learn more to start a new career, with the job losses staying one jump ahead of them. With the deck stacked as it is, people will never catch up unless Washington gets a clue.

The occupy movement is the right thing at the right time, and watching TPTB fighting them now means they are scared they are losing...which they are.

[midnight]

5. Maybe.... But first blame those who ship our jobs out of the country and

those who make our teachers teach in over crowed class rooms... Hire more teachers and put people to work.... Don't make our nurse work in understaffed facilities... Hire more student nurses and give them their clinicals... Next I blame the filthy rich who are sitting on the piles of money from our treasury. Thirdly, I blame our elected officials for acting like they can't think of anything other than give our money to the richest people on the planet.... and block the creation of jobs... and then I blame the way technology is used to steal our votes...

[girl gone mad]

6. We have the means to reach full employment.

Anyone who is willing and able to work should be employed. It's just a matter of spending appropriately.

[dkf]

10. Who is supposed to spend to hire anyone who wants a job?

How's it possible that everyone's skills are matched to what an employer will pay for?

[Amonester]

7. The notion of robots doing all the work and human beings on ....

permanent vacation doesn't stand.

First and formost, this planet doesn't have unlimited resources to sustain that notion before it would come to that point. So IOW, it is a kind of a race to human life extinction.

Second, it entails that their would have to be robots that build and maintain other robots, and that once these robots would need maintenance, other robots would have to maintain the 'maintainers' themselves.

Third, robots would need to be powered by an unlimited source of energy (solar?) while humans need to eat and drink 'something' to generate the energy we need to function, but again, this notion would never even reach the first stage stated above to begin with.

So to sum it up, this whole race for productivity is stupid to the core: it will only lead to massive deaths and extinction of both humans AND robots: where's the 'intelligence' in this if nobody has the 'intelligence' to foresee the unavoidable consequence?

[Name removed]

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[dkf]

9. It's going to happen. The question is how you adjust for it.

[Laluchacontinua]

12. How you adjust for the end of capitalism, you mean.

[Tesha]

13. Yes, technology (in many forms) is directly responsible for high unemployment.

If we didn't have snow plows, we'd have millions clearing
the streets after snowstorms just like the Chinese still
do it.

If we didn't have shipping technology, we wouldn't be
receiving thousands of shipping containers from overseas
containing manufactured goods; we'd be making the goods
locally.

If we didn't have communications technologies, the jobs
of "knowledge workers" wouldn't have been off-shored.

If we didn't have robotic technology, tens of thousands
more workers would be required to manufacture automobiles.

And so on...

Then again, technology has enabled many good things (and
I really don't need to list them, right?).

Tesha

[dkf]

14. They may even enable retirement if we can make them do all the work.

But the. We have to figure out how to distribute funds so people can live.

[Tesha]

17. Yes, but our society has to recognize that there will be less and less work "to do"...

...and still allow people to eat, house themselves,
and etc.

Right now, we're still in the (century long?) transition
period between "having to work for a living" and "no one
has to labor at all".

Tesha

[dkf]

18. We really need thinkers and planners.

It's too bad our governance isn't done by visionaries and geniuses.

[FarLeftFist]

15. Technology is a huge factor in unemployment.

[blindpig]

16. No, rather the capitalist use of technology.

We could produce everything that people need and have full employment with fewer hours if the capitalist were not organizing society solely for their own benefit. Capitalism requires unemployment to keep wages low.

[Huey P. Long]

19. What happened to all that 'free time' we were supposed to get as a society?

All those productivity gains and technology were supposed to award us free time and opportunity. It ALL went to the upper tier exploiters.

The social contract has been broken.