It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time before an education becomes out of date or stale decreases. There is some percentage of the population today who would rather be poor than retrain. It stands to reason that as the rate of change increases, that percentage of the population will also increase.
Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for them to live like human beings not because they deserve it, but because they are alive. This is the crux of the choice. Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?
I've seen economists mulling over your second point a little lately - it's not a new concept though, it's called "basic income": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
A fictional basic income exists in Star Trek TNG in relation to Federation credits. This is achievable because the Star Trek TNG universe is post-scarcity but credits are used to ration non-replicable goods.
Basic income aka perustulo is popular topic in current Finnish politics. I believe the Green League (which is unusually large party here - nearly 10% share) adopted it first.
Recent polls indicate that the idea of Basic income could be favored by 30% of Finns.
marvin commented about Norway's "uførepensjon". Finland has it too. If you aren't able to get work for years and are deemed unemployable, you can get "unemployment pension" much in the same way as sick pension.
But basic income is another thing. Everyone - including the employed - would get a lump sum of basic income. On top of that they could earn extra by working (taxable income) or just live off with the basic income. It is seen as a way to drastically simplify the welfare system, where some money is simply lost to bureaucracy. The caveat is the possibility that too many could choose not to earn extra money by working.
This is a pretty interesting idea. I actually saw it discussed in the Norwegian popular financial magazine Your Money (Dine Penger) last year. In this instance, the relevant point was that Norway already has a sort of de facto basic income system. It's called "uførepensjon" (a rough translation would be "pension for those unfit to work"). It consists of approximately 23,000 pre-tax US dollars per year, and it's where you end up if you are sick, disabled or otherwise unable to acquire a decent job over a period of a few years; basically if you have received unemployment benefits for years and all attempts by the bureucratic system to get you back into the workforce have failed.
Approximately 7% of all Norwegians currently receive these payments. The author of the article in question suggested a system of gradual negative taxation for very low wages, so if you earn less than 23000 USD per year at your current job, the missing part will be paid to you by the government. The line of reasoning is that most people will not be happy without more money than this, and hence will work normally.
I'm not sure if even Norway is rich enough to support a system like this on a full scale, and taxation in the US is _definitely_ not harsh enough to do it, even with the amount adjusted to GDP per capita. But it would be nice if we someday ended up rich enough that extreme poverty could be eliminated in this way. None of the people covered by this system have to starve, and all health payments are also handled through the official system.
"taxation in the US is _definitely_ not harsh enough"
It seems to me that the US spends 46.5% of all money spend world wide collectively by all nations on military spending. China, France, UK, Russia, and then next 10 biggest spending countries spend less than the US when they are all added together.
In addition the US imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world, including totalitarian police states, and a much greater proportion than any modern western nation.
In addition, the US spends a fortune on education and gets very poor outcomes.
In addition, the US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country in the world and has far worse outcomes than most countries, with infant mortality now falling behind many third world nations, and the interesting reality that the life expectancy of an indigenous Lakota indian man living in South Dakota receiving free unlimited federal health care is now 44 years. This is lower than 187 out of 195 of the nations in the world and is only higher than nations which are afflicted with BOTH massive civil war AND endemic AIDS, Malaria and Cholera.
Surely there is a way to pay for a basic living standard for the unskilled without raising taxes.
"It seems to me that the US spends 46.5% of all money spend world wide collectively by all nations on military spending."
Which is probably the real reason that we're in such debt -- it should be blindingly obvious to the entire world that there's no longer any valid reason to dump such an astronomically large amount of money into armed forces that we clearly don't need. Unfortunately, the magnitude of that spending is probably related to the fact that a sizable chunk of it winds up in congressional (etc) pockets, and has nothing to do with the actual military itself.
"In addition, the US spends a fortune on education and gets very poor outcomes."
Which agrees with the author's assertion that high school graduates are less skilled now than their predecessors, a trend that I've been seeing as well.
"In addition, the US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country in the world and has far worse outcomes than most countries,"
This is probably a combination of excessive organizational bloat and decreasing quality of the medical staff themselves. (The stories a close friend of mine told me about his medical school compatriots were nauseating... these people obviously didn't understand a single bit of the chemistry that they studied in college, and it became blindingly obvious that neither did most of the biochemistry professors at Johns Hopkins of all places.)
We're heading into a downward spiral, since these are the people who will be taking over and running the show as well as "mentoring" the next generation of educational victims.
It's a breakable spiral, but it won't happen unless a lot of people get a clue and recognize what's happening. Sadly most of them have been culturally conditioned to be automata, and avoid thinking for themselves, which is going to make this tailspin hard to break out of.
President Nixon mulled over the idea of a guaranteed minimum income for Americans which, IIRC, mutated into the earned income tax credit program. Of course these days no mainstream progressive or liberal would support the idea. Things have changed a lot.
It used to actually be a quite popular position among libertarian-ish economists, strangely enough: Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman were both in favor of a guaranteed minimum income.
Also see "the Plan", recently proposed by Charles Murray. The welfare state is entirely done away with; in its place every adult gets $10k/year for life.
It might be extremely healthy for economy. Market works because consumers make thoughtful decisions. Poor people have to put much thought in their purchases. Increasing money available to poor people without making them feel rich increases market ability to prefer more efficient producers and service providers.
Of course curbing commercials a bit to allow people to make less brainwashed decisions also would be good for market.
You also need safeguards in place so companies in search of greater efficiency won't release harmful products.
The three main reasons they gave were: 1) a functioning free market with rational agents voluntarily exchanging goods and services requires non-desperate individuals who can realistically say "no" to proposed economic exchanges; 2) a guaranteed minimum income would make people more autonomous market participants, as they would feel more free to be entrepreneurs, and to break from more cliquish kinds of safety nets like churches and ethnic groups; and 3) pragmatically, direct cash transfers are the least distorting kind of anti-poverty program, so a minimum income will greatly reduce political pressure for more distorting measures, like restrictions on when you can fire employees.
In Milton Friedmans capitalism and freedom, he discuss (among other things) that proposal - he admits not liking it too much, but it is better than the current system of welfare and it is more realistic to create that than to kill the welfare system.
In addition you save the expenditure associated with paying for the enforcement, social workers, etc.
We could probably accomplish it as well, though I'd favor providing goods and services rather than money.
It would not cost a lot to provide millions of people with nutritious food, beds in a dormitory built in cheap locations and 1970-era health care.
We do live in a world where scarcity no longer applies to many goods. We just don't realize it because we compare ourselves to our neighbors rather than our ancestors.
Hmm the thing is, the Star Trek universe isn't post-scarcity in any meaningful way. Sure, if you are living on a starship you can replicate anything and spend all your free time on the holiday deck. But the Federation (and all the competing civilizations) have very finite capacity to build and crew starships.
People might do it for fun as they do now. No-one needs to farm anymore because you can just buy your food at the grocery store cheaper than it could be grown.
> Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?
Depending on what the ratios of the two are, they might not have any choice. If it gets more towards the extreme of 10% of people having lots of money while 90% starve, then those 10% had better get used to living in fortified enclaves, 18th-century-France style.
A difference between 18th century France and a medium-term future may be that peasants were essential members of the workforce in the 18th century, whereas the "have nots" may, for the first time, be entirely unnecessary to the ruling classes in order to maintain their quality of life.
If that situation came about, I doubt they'd need fortified enclaves unless they truly preferred that set up. They could merely wipe out the have-nots and be done with it. Or, if we're going to the distant future and the "haves" are more moral, they could just leave Earth and live elsewhere leaving the "have nots" to fight over dirt.
Part of my point is that I don't think the rich could win such a struggle of forces if they're a small minority: it would be more likely that the poor wipe them out, or at least confiscate their wealth, than vice versa. The rich currently survive easily basically because the vast majority of Americans support a rule of law that lets them retain their prerogatives; they are not capable of defending their own prerogatives, at least as things are currently set up. If it were angry masses versus rich people hiring private security contractors, I think angry masses win. A big wild card would be which side the government is on. If the government is run by populists interested in redistributing wealth, do you really think a small minority of wealthy could resist the police?
Well, corrupt third-world countries do live like that and it rarely comes to full-blown riots, usually only when there is little to eat. There doesn't need to be an open confrontation.
But you're right in that the poor are still part of the workforce, hence they do wield power, even if poorly organized. This might be not for long.
There is an interesting case of Russia which is populated by 142 million people, while the ruling elites only have a need for maybe 10% of that number to maintain their natural gas and oil revenue (plus the nukes to defend the same). It might be worth paying attention to as a model of what's to come.
An analogy with 18th century France does not call attention to the fact that the tiny minority of French who were aristocrats had survived the 17th, 16th, 15th, 14th, 13th, 12th, etc centuries just fine, putting down rebellions as needed. Like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie
The rich would have a much bigger advantage now because they could afford high-tech weapons. More so in the future. It's just a matter of how far they're willing to go.
At the same time, the saying 'the more you know, the less you need' applies to the poor as well as the rich. those who can afford, for instance, a network connection, can easily find out how to build such things as mustard gas, thermite bombs, etc. The capability of one person to do damage has increased a great deal since the industrial revolution, and a great deal more since the explosion of such things as libraries and later the internet.
The rich can use thermite bombs and mustard gas too.
Iraq could be an example either way. Saddam Hussein had an inferior military to the US, but he could rule the country because he had no compunctions about doing things like gassing villages for opposing him. He was from the Sunni minority, disliked by the Shiite majority, but he had no problem putting down rebellions even after getting badly beaten by the US in '91.
So, as a rebel, your chances depend on the kind of leader you're fighting. If it's a Bush or a Louis XVII, you're in business. If it's a Saddam or someone like the men who put down the Jacquerie, not so much. In the limiting case, the powerful could simply round everybody they didn't like up and exterminate them, Nazi-style, if they chose to do so.
and what kind of leader do you think Warren "I don't pay enough in taxes" Buffet would be? And certainly, if you needed to keep the college-educated bleeding-heart middle classes and upper middle classes on your side, you would be forced to use tactics even less effective than what the us military currently uses in the middle east, which from here look pretty ineffective.
Hell, look at Gates; a guy who could almost be called bloodthirsty as a businessman, ends up donating some huge portion of his fortune to some feel-good charity.
I just don't think those guys have what it takes to be a Saddam. Even if they did; being ruthless and having a matériel and technology advantage is not always enough. Look at how Afghanistan kicked the crap out of the USSR. This wasn't 'cause the USSR was afraid to wipe out villages with it's vastly superior armament... this was because with currently available weapons, it's damn hard to occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied.
Re: Afghanistan v. the Soviets
The British could do it. I see no reason to believe the Afghans would be able to put more than a dent in total air superiority so they could have won the same way.
If the russians could have won through total air superiority, they would have. because they had it, and it didn't make the difference.
I imagine that flight was a greater advantage when it was new, before the insurgents figured out how to effectively counter it (which is to say, to hide amongst civilians friendly to the enemy or to stay underground)
but yeah, I think, at this point, advances in asymmetrical warfare techniques have largely neutralized the advantages of air superiority.
Certainly our current leaders are not the type to mass murder unemployed Americans. But these things can change. Nobody in the 1920s thought that the Germans would soon be trying to exterminate unwanted ethnic groups and colonize Eastern Europe like whites colonized North America (nobody except Hitler, who had already planned it).
> Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for them to live like human beings
This is what's known as a false dichotomy.
A similar false dichotomy would read, "Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let criminals rule the world and have no laws. 2) Execute everyone who commits any crime."
The premise of the choices, which you conveniently left out, was that a significant percentage of people would be unable to provide a sizable income for themselves, because they lack the intellectual capacities. From that the binary answer is quite reasonable; the inbetween would be that people would be able to make themselves non-poor, and we started out by saying that that would not be feasible.
Unless you have another middle of the road, which I would be interested to hear about. When claiming a false dichotomy the customary thing to do is to provide a(n) example(s) of other options, however short.
> Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?
Do the haves have a choice to "give"? The reality is that in a democratic society with an income tax, if the have-nots outnumber the haves, the haves will be forced to support the have-nots.
The have-nots of today might as well be kings to those living 1000 years ago. Still, having a strong middle class is good for everyone, regardless of moral imperatives to help others.
Why is that? Even if there was enough wealth around to make everyone a king by today's standards, if someone had no marketable skills or capital, why would anyone give anything to him? It would be up to the haves whether they wanted to play Mr Nice Guy or not, and I don't think the choice is obvious.
Everyone in the middle class is a king by the standards of the 1950s. I have, as a starving student, more wealth than any emperor of Rome. The assumption that we're not already upstream in the singularity is just bias of perspective
Presumably you have a job, or you have parents with a job that are supporting you, or you live on student loans given to you by people who expect that you will get a job and pay you back with interest. If there's a hypothetical machine that can do your job, then you won't get one, and there's no reason other than charity for anyone to give you money.
Until now, if a machine took a job, that just meant that another worker was available for another job that a machine couldn't do. Machines are pretty dumb, so that's not hard to find. A kid with Down's syndrome can sweep the floor at Taco Bell, but a machine can't. That changes with the singularity.
All humans have on average the same intelligence. Why do you assume that there will be a few who will be able to keep up with the pace of retraining oneself. In many poor countries the reason they stay poor has to do with cultural differences rather than IQ differences. i.e. If you teach your kids from a very young age to have good work ethics and good study ethics and teach that anything is possible as long as they work hard then they will grow up to be achievers. If you do not teach your kids this then chances are that they will be poor. Besides, if we ever do achieve the singularity and assuming that we do not destroy ourselves many things that are really expensive now will become extremely cheap in such a way that even the poorest person will still live like a rich person. Singularity will enable us to find solutions to energy much faster than if we tried to do it on our own. It will probably find a way to extract all the energy we need from the sun's rays. Once this happens energy will be as cheap as the oxygen you breath. We'll also have self replicating machines meaning that anything anybody has you will be able to build it in your own home. In fact, poverty may be eliminated all together. Who knows what will become valuable in the new economy. Really, I don't think we can even begin to imagine it. We will probably work to better ourselves and humanity. Yes, we will work maybe even more than before even if we have all the material wealth we can have. Why? Well, because most human beings become depressed if they are not doing anything. We will do what we truly feel passionate about rather than work in a crappy job just to pay the bills because there will be little to no bills to pay. The future is truly Star Trek.
> All humans have on average the same intelligence. Why do you assume that there will be a few who will be able to keep up with the pace of retraining oneself.
I think you do not quite understand the concept of an 'average'. When one is hiring for a job, does one hire 'humanity' with its average, or an individual human who can be arbitrarily above or below the average?
I stand corrected. You are assuming that a person with a phd is inherently smarter than a person running a hot dog stand. He is not. He has more accumulated knowledge but I don't think he is necessarily smarter. I bet that if the hot dog person had been rightly motivated at a young age he could also get a phd. Also, a lot of people are able to game interviews.
The difference between an average intelligent person and a super genius is really quite small when it comes to brain power. What you will notice is that the super genius got to where he is because he has worked harder at it than anybody else. From the outside it looks like he is just that much smarter than you or me. The truth is that he is probably just as smart as you or me. He just works harder than you or me at what he does. Same with talented pianist or painters. People like to think that they are borne that way. The truth is that they log thousands and thousands of hours working at it, usually at a very young age. Once they become very good at what they do people label it as talent and do not remember the hard work that it took them to get there. A really brief example, to people from 2000 years ago you will seem like a super-super genius because of all the things you know. Is that truth? No, people from 2000 years are just as smart as you and me. Difference between geniuses and average person is probably so minuscule that it really doesn't contribute that much to success. Persistence and working at it is what makes the difference. There are a lot of supposed geniuses (really high IQ averages) that are complete bums and never achieve anything in life.
> You are assuming that a person with a phd is inherently smarter than a person running a hot dog stand.
I'm assuming that if I pick random PhDs and hot dog vendors, I will get a higher average IQ from my random PhDs. Are my PhDs strictly greater in IQ than my hot dog sellers? Maybe, maybe not. But will, say, 99% of my PhDs have a higher IQ? I'd bet on that number or something like it.
> No, people from 2000 years are just as smart as you and me.
No, they were not. There were a few geniuses back then, the ones we still read and write books about. All few tens of thousands of them out of billions. But the average was vastly below the modern-day.
The environmental causes alone are legion: lead plumbing, no formal schooling (worth something like 5-10 IQ points), rampant parasitic diseases of every conceivable sort, irregular or poor nutrition with nutritional deficits (protein deficiency damaging early neurological development - low myelination of nerves, iodine deficiency, etc.), medicine that would kill most patients...
Your only valid points are that IQ is not perfectly correlated with success and that it varies within every group. This is not news to anyone who has done even a little reading on the topic.
I think you and me are using different definitions of smart. You think a person is smart only if he goes to school. That is not what I mean by smart. So that you understand I'll use potential education ability as my definition for smart. A person from a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as anybody else. A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time. Now, what is the potential for a dog. Its potential is that he can learn a couple of hundreds of words during his life time. You cannot increase your potential to learn when you are born the same way that a dog cannot increase his potential to learn so that it matches that of a human. I would say the majority (99%) of the human population today as with those of 2000 years ago have the potential to earn a phd.
A person with far more education than you and me and by your definition much more smarter than you or me pretty much agrees with me. If you want to become great- i.e. get a phd and do great research - you have to work harder than the other person. Notice how much "work" is emphasized.
Honestly if you still don't agree with me after this than I give up. Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart. You cannot convince the person that simply refuses to see.
> You think a person is smart only if he goes to school.
I have never said this. It is a well-established fact that schooling is not just correlated with IQ, but actually causes an increase (Husén & Tuijnman 1991).
> A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time.
...and you ignore my environmental arguments entirely.
And yes, I've read Hamming's lecture several times. Hamming was a great scientist. However, he was both not a social scientist, and he was addressing a room full of scientists at Bell Labs, one of the most effective research institutes in the 20th century. No one mentioned IQ because everyone there already had all the IQ they needed! Bell Labs was one of the brainiest places around! It was on par with MIT, where even the secretaries used and programmed early Emacs!
It'd be like discussing how to become a great programmer, and mentioning that you need to be alive. It's a prerequisite that's already met; discussing it is an utter waste of time and balmy.
Nowhere does Hamming say, 'and btw it doesn't matter if you score a 60 on an IQ test and can barely dress yourself in the morning, you just need to follow my suggestions and you have a shot at the Nobel!' Because that would be idiotic. Rather, Hamming at the very beginning states:
> "I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done."
He assumes from the beginning that he is discussing 'very capable' people and why some accomplish great things and some don't.
> Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart.
> I'm assuming that if I pick random PhDs and hot dog vendors, I will get a higher average IQ from my random PhDs. Are my PhDs strictly greater in IQ than my hot dog sellers? Maybe, maybe not. But will, say, 99% of my PhDs have a higher IQ? I'd bet on that number or something like it.
Are PhDs dominated by technical types? Can you have PhD in arts or post modern philosophy? Does that require high IQ?
> No, they were not. There were a few geniuses back then, the ones we still read and write books about. All few tens of thousands of them out of billions. But the average was vastly below the modern-day.
Not everyone could write a book back then. Not every book from back then survived. You can't tell how many ancient Ramanujans left no trace. Ingenious concepts of later ages often cropped up multiple times centuries earlier only to be dismissed and forgotten.
That said you are spot on environmental factors. Here http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_... it is said that thing as simple as deworming might increase very significantly children spend on learning and training their intellectual capacities.
> Can you have PhD in arts or post modern philosophy? Does that require high IQ?
Yes, and yes for the latter. Philosophy is my own field, and while I would be much more comfortable making this assertion of analytic philosophers, post-modern (I'll assume you really mean 'continental') philosophers are still very smart people.
Since you aren't doing any research, I will do just a little, and point out that philosophy PhDs tend to have been philosophy majors, and philosophy majors tend to have extremely high GRE scores, and the GRE is extremely correlated with IQ; philosophy majors are #1 and beat every other major when it comes to the Verbal and Analytic Writing sections - surely not the work of people of average intelligence - and rank 15th out of 50 in math scores (ahead of majors such as biology, accounting, architecture and others; being beaten by various engineering, physics/astronomy, and math majors): http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...
> Not every book from back then survived.
Yes, but many catalogues (the Suda eg.) and quotes have survived. The survival rate and biases introduced by history can, and have been, estimated. (The latest one I heard about used statistics about the survival of works of the Venerable Bede, but I can't find the citation in a quick google.) The bias is not orders of magnitude, though it hits some authors badly (Sophocles's prize-winners, eg.) as one would expect from a random process.
Or, the future is the most competitive, up to date persons moving into a range of capability which allows them to marginally outcompete their less up to date peers, catching a faster acceleration. Their less up to date peers follow suit, but while they're retraining for their new devices, the leading edge is learning, faster than before, an even newer device.
Or, even better, the minds of kurzwiel's singularity are owned, trained, and taught by competitive corporations, who's only job is to make a great deal of money. The best firms are the ones who compete in the harshest manner, and again, the average gets left far behind. I think its far a mistake to assume that more stuff means an egalitarian future.
If people are poor then they won't be able to buy your stuff. On the other hand people with more money means that they'll have a stronger buying power. It benefits the rich that the average person is also well off.
People will kill to own a singularity device. However, I don't think this will be necessary since by the time we are technologically ready to invent such a machine it will be invented or duplicated in every single country on earth and by anybody that wants one. We will reach a point in our future where the knowledge to build an Artificial Intelligence machine will be obvious by everybody the same way it is obvious now that the earth is round. This will make it impossible for any single entity to control this technology. The knowledge will be out there in the net for anybody to read. This assuming that we are not stupid enough to destroy ourselves before we reach this point.
We live in a time where the workforce is going to have to be retrained 3 or 4 times in their lifetimes. That means that 4-year universities wouldn't work even if they were functioning correctly, which they aren't.
There's a larger question of whether this workforce can be trained that many times or not. I don't think we have a choice, so I'd rather just go out and fix the problem instead of ruminating over it. We have a very nasty tendency to ruminate and self-flagellate over structural problems instead of just going out and fixing them.
I do know that we can't use the same institutions, programs, and policies that got us into this to get us out, and I know that there is a huge population that is going to resist the necessary change.
(and btw, "fixing the problem" may not involve retraining. Hell, we might end up personally outsourcing each of our lives to several generations of folks in developing countries and picking up a profit on the difference in standards of living over the next 50 years while the average skill level in the world equalizes. Lots of possible solutions, and I'm not sure I would define the problem as simply as an obsolete workforce)
Probably, but at what price? I stopped programming PHP when one of my clients asked me what I offered that somebody from India that he could hire for $3/hr didn't. While I was standing in his office, face-to-face.
There's nothing wrong with hiring $3/hr workers (I now do it myself, though not for programming.) But, as time goes forward and we develop more ways for the rest of the world to get online, we're going to have to realize that many programmers won't make it, either, especially if they expect to be paid San Francisco wages for India work.
There's nothing wrong with hiring $3/hr workers (I now do it myself, though not for programming.) But, as time goes forward and we develop more ways for the rest of the world to get online, we're going to have to realize that many programmers won't make it, either, especially if they expect to be paid San Francisco wages for India work.
You have the advantage of a reputation and similar culture. Plus, your employer can call you while you're awake, while not rudely waking up Indian programmers in the middle of the night. Indian programmers might not be any good at all or wishes to understand your need. They probably just bid on many projects without reading the requirement.
Beside, it's only temporary. The living standard will goes up and Indians will demand higher wages to support their rising expenses.
I interviewed at a small dot com where the owner told me essentially the same thing after not hiring me based on salary requirements.
I take satisfaction in noting that three years later his company's site is essentially still where it was then, with none of his plans actually implemented.
Guess those cheaper programmers didn't work out so well.
So you didn't know what your value was. That says more about you than outsourcing or anything else.
What you should have been able to say is that that $3/hr Indian worker doesn't have the experience (and therefor level of skill) that you do. If he did it's extremely unlikely that he would continue to work for $3/hr. Sure, maybe he can live a comfortable life on $3/hr in India, but if he leverages his experience to move to a first world country to make money he can become rich (provided he lives frugally in said first world country and invests his money back home). Which is why so many do it.
You coulda said "well, what are you worth per hour? Because that outsourced worker actually costs that + $3/hr when you consider the detailed spec writing you'll have to do when there's not someone in your office who knows your company and your industry and you can just talk to".
The india example has nothing to do with machines but rather global wealth disparity. The india problem as in your anecdote will disappear whenever this wealth gap closes.
The article is discussing something entirely different.
IMO programmers will never go out of style until we have real AI. And when we have real AI all humans will be last season's sentience.
On the other side of the coin programming, especially web programming, probably moves forward faster than most other professions. You may not need formal training again as the underlying concepts are usually the same but the vast majority would have to learn new methods and languages over their career.
I can see this happening in the near future with concurrency in programming, there is going to be a shift more and more towards concurrent programming where most popular languages and methods now will struggle and we will have to move towards programming in ways that the compiler can help us a lot more with concurrency as languages like Haskell have been designed to do.
That means that 4-year universities wouldn't work even if they were functioning correctly, which they aren't.
The real benefit of a college degree is that it broadens your horizons and increases your capacity for knowledge. Sure you can do that on your own but most 18-21 year olds have trouble maintaining the focus required for self-learning.
Theory classes like accounting, finance, database, history provide the most benefit and really don't change a lot over time. The more hands-on classes like programming (anyone use Cobol after Y2k?) Internet marketing (did you know you can PAY to be on search engines?) were a waste of time as they did quickly become outdated.
"I'm something of an enthusiast... but what do you get out of a history class that you don't get out of a history book?"
Some people (myself among them) prefer to learn by initially getting taught the subject basics from a person that knows the subject matter. This allows you to get direct feedback to your questions, gives you an idea of the overall scope of the subject and sets you thinking on the right path.
For example, I find trying to learn a new programming language from scratch from a book very challenging. Whereas if I attended a basic course on it (even for a few hours or days just to cover the basics), I learn it much better and faster. I then go off and buy the necessary books/search the web to augment my knowledge. Different people learn differently. I just happen to prefer human contact at the outset, whereas others will pick you a book and teach themselves to become experts all on their own.
1) A good idea about which history books to read, and in what order.
2) A collection of knowledgeable colleagues with whom to discuss history
3) (optional) A pretty certificate.
Any professor worth their salt will guide a debate among the classmates, and try to get students to argue about the interpretations of events, instead of spoonfeeding them from a history book.
So, what do you get? A set of different views coming from your classmates. An exposure to methods of debate. And so on.
> question of whether this workforce can be trained that many times
You're missing the point that roughly 25% of the population can't be trained to a modern skill in the first place. They simply aren't smart enough. A fifth of people are "functionally" illiterate. It's a real stretch to blame that on training/schooling rather than dim wits.
Fifty years ago these people could earn a decent living tightening nuts on an assembly line or picking fruit. Now they're just borderline useless as we have machines to do most of that sort of work. It takes 100 people to build a sky scraper, whereas there used to be an army of men running around with wheel barrows.
The whole point of the article and the referenced book, "A Farewell to Alms", is that people have different genetic and cultural potentials in a modern industrialized society. The book documents how the English gene pool changed (eugenic forces) leading up to the industrial revolution. It argues that the industrial revolution happened in England because the English people had become smart and disciplined enough to work in factories. English industrialists in the 1800s kept on trying to take factories to cheap third world labor, and over and over it failed because the local population couldn't hack it. Productivity was too low. It was not a matter of training.
The point here is that we are dealing with uncomfortable issues that transcend something like a "no child left behind" act. A large fraction of humanity may simply be useless to modern commerce.
It's a real stretch to blame that on training/schooling rather than dim wits.
I'm not sure that's true. There is some evidence that literacy and numeracy rates fell under New Labour. That government was characterized by high spending on "trendy" methods, rather that the basic "3 Rs". Reciting the alphabet and memorizing the times tables might be "discredited" now but it's hard to argue with the observation that the generation(s) taught that way can actually read and count...
Note that in addition to the functional illiterates there are a lot of people who can read basic material (eg "My dog Spot"), but who in daily life regularly run into material that they are unable to understand (like newspapers, or the instructions on medicine bottles).
I would not be surprised if the fraction of people with basic competency at reading and wrong is under 50%.
This sounds like the old fascist idea that there are groups of people who are genetically inferior and cannot participate in a modern society, so should be sterilized or otherwise removed.
Indeed. And it doesn't look like we'll be able to replace many extremely easy jobs (from an intellectual point of view) by machines any time soon : picking up garbage, taking care of old people, etc.
Consequence: Those people can barely live above the poverty line. They are regularly on government support programs even though they are working a full time job.
Also, they can't afford and iPad or a new car. Henry Ford recognized the value of paying his workers well. Trash collectors and CNA's aren't typically paid well.
>Or we can rephrase the entire posting as “How comfortable would you feel working at your present job alongside someone whom you would rate as among the least competent 25 percent from your high school?”
Middle management are also part of the mass of unemployed.
From the tone of the article it sounds like the government has made it too risky and expensive to hire unskilled employees(combination of lawsuits, expenses, higher minimum wage and taxes).
Isn't this the group of people that the government is supposed to be protecting?
the interesting bit here is that most of those things are really only risky for entities who have money; larger entities. You are going to have a pretty difficult time getting a lawyer to bring an employment lawsuit against, say, me- the problem is that I don't have enough money to make it worth the lawyer time.
(I mean, yeah, if you really have it in for me, you could pay the lawyer yourself, or try to make it a criminal matter (usually a /much/ higher bar) and take me down... but few self-interested lawyers would take the case for a cut of the winnings, simply because the winnings would be so small.)
and the problem of expensive mistakes is also mitigated; you can't make a mistake at a company that does worse than bankrupting the company and the owner personally; And, uh, I don't consider myself a low-skilled worker, but working for other people? I've made at least one mistake expensive enough to bankrupt my company and myself personally, had my company been liable. (the thing was, I didn't get fired... in fact, my review that year at that job was mildly positive and included a 4% raise. That was, apparently, a relatively minor mistake at that company? I mean, I felt pretty horrible about it, and took steps to prevent it from happening again, but there weren't the heavy consequences from above you'd expect from blowing many years of your salary.)
I think the future of work, then, has to be creation. It just can't get any more singular and essential than that. It's the work of ideation - a terrible biz-buzzword that means "creating ideas".
Not the type of namby-pamby aleatoric nonsense that people boozily tell you is a million-dollar idea that they thought of like "I thought of eBay before it was around" or the Hollywood pitch-type ideas like "it's a cross between Facebook and tumblr... wait for it... for book lovers."
I'm talking about, everyone basically becomes an entrepreneur, or at least is the equivalent of the starving artist, essentially singing for their meal. If necessity is the mother of invention, well then that's a relief because we're headed for some Needful Times.
Of course, _ALL_ of this is assuming that China or some developing country will always have an abundance of cheap labor, which is more quickly evaporating than we want to see. There is a reason why China's middle class just recently eclipsed the US in size, and it's not only because they have 5x the people. They are starting to take care of their own, and realizing their own labor's affordability. The rich here in America may not need us in the short-term, but Comparative Advantage doesn't work when the formerly disadvantaged country suddenly holds all the chips.
That is assuming we can't figure out how to make computers create on their own (which right now, does sound almost impossible). If at some point we figure it out, all humans become obsolete.
I don't think you can call them "previous" just yet. It's entirely possible for the world to erupt into a ww3, simply due to hundreds of millions of seriously unemployed people. Arguably that was the reason for ww1 as well as huge number of people were made redundant in agriculture.
It was also the reason for WW2. Germany put all those unemployed people to work on many national projects. Projects which were aimed at world domination.
All this was before unemployed people could spend 12 hours a day killing people in Call Of Duty 4, though. I think the availability of cheap distraction (interactive distraction at that) might have some effect here.
I'm 'work-vacationing' in Brazil right now, and for some reason this is very much on my mind. Labor is very cheap here. Restaurants are heavily overstaffed by American standards, as are grocery stores and even hair parlors. I can't help but wonder what would happen here if cheap robotics existed. For most of the lower class here "retraining" probably isn't a possibility.
The difference in education level between poor Brazilians and poor Americans is very large. Retraining requires a base to start with, and most poor Brazilians simply don't have that base.
I'm skeptical to some degree about the potential for retraining of Americans too, but I at least have some optimism there.
Services are funny things. If I clean up your place for 1 mln dollars and you cut my hair for 1 mln dollars then we raised GDP by 2 mln.
As technology progresses economy becomes more and more detached from reality. People manufacture insanely advanced items almost for free and produce most complex intellectual property literally for free and money more and more represents just back-rubbing and gambling.
Honestly, how can we pretend that we have a choice in the matter at this point? It is a matter of how we deal with the responsibility that technology forces on us. Even if the US could outlaw reproductive manipulation, some significant percent of humans will explore the problem. We shouldnt't just say that it is eugenics, because that just means we are calling it genocide with a better name.
It is the height of hubris to presume that genetic engineering can produce better results than billions of years of evolution. Tweak our genes to improve our abilities in one area and you'll end up with unintended problems in another area. Hypothetically, would you take a 20% improvement in intelligence if it came with a 50% risk of schizophrenia?
Almost all of the genetic engineering done so far has been targeted toward a single goal: improving the productivity of domesticated plants and animals for agriculture. And while it has been successful in increasing food production, it has also produced breeds / strains that that are incapable of surviving without humans. There is no free lunch in genetic engineering.
The 50% with the schizophrenia will die or be locked up, and the rest will be smarter. So as a whole the species will become better with each iteration. Evolutionary selection will still march on, the source of improvements (natural variation or bio=engineered) is irrelevant.
Interesting article, but populist, not quite what would you expect from an article on Harvard.
As another person mentioned, people are not horses. A horse is a slave, people always have options, in the most drastic case, crime. It pays well for those with the intelligence I think but the risks are astronomical compared to a 9 to five job.
I think our society if it wishes to become more prosperous needs to realise two things. First, everyone has the potential to be smart at least at the level of the skills needed for many of today's jobs. Thus if someone does not have the skills of this century but that of the last century it is almost everyone's fault, that is the society, the institutions, the culture, but him. Unless of course he or she is biologically mentally inferior in which case it is just and decent to pay taxes to support them.
The second thing is that the Industrial Revolution has moved on to china. It no longer is here. We produce things, but things like software development, biotech, nanotech, high physics, a lot of research, innovative and new products. Not, TVs and cars and that sort of thing. We are so prosperous because we keep making things better and inventing things and finding things and of course because of trade. Once so it is, the automated reproduction, after a certain time shifts to the Industrial Countries.
So, in this economy, you need to use your brain a lot and be taught so since early childhood. It is no good that someone can just fail in school or get Ds, because that someone will probably be tomorrow's unemployed, well conventionally unemployed. Events might be so lucky for him as to stumble upon creating a business, or not so lucky as to stumble upon crime.
I think therefore that if we want to move forward in the most prosperous way it is advisable to not leave anyone behind especially when we have the ability to take everyone with us.
While I agree with the premise and have often tried to discuss the need to look at the distribution of leisure that the technological revolution has brought upon us, the comparison to the horse is apt because :
> Best case: IT department spends $50,000 cleaning up; worst case: customer lists, customer credit cards, and other private data are compromised, costing millions of dollars.
Those millions of dollars are after the damn thing bolted and it's your own negligent fault for not doing a risk assessment and cutting corners on your IT system. As a no-doubt highly paid suit it's your responsibility to think of these things before they happen. It's not like it never happened to anyone else before.
It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time before an education becomes out of date or stale decreases. There is some percentage of the population today who would rather be poor than retrain. It stands to reason that as the rate of change increases, that percentage of the population will also increase.
Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for them to live like human beings not because they deserve it, but because they are alive. This is the crux of the choice. Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?