"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it."
That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines.
It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence of today's software engineering jobs - but it destroyed a lot of jobs in agriculture and textile because you could produce more with a fraction of the labor.
To the point that people would manifest and destroy steam machines accusing them of stealing jobs (see "Luddites").
Let's not forget that what is typically called "industrial revolution" spans over a century and it took a while for the industrial revolution to create a lot of new jobs (approx the second half of the 19th century), and those new jobs were initially very poorly paid.
The problem is that it was relatively easy to master the technologies of the industrial revolution.
It isn't the same for the software revolution.
You can take virtually any adult from any part of the world and teach him how to work in a factory within a few months of study.
You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding.
I think of myself as relatively smart but I've struggled with learning how to code. The learning curve is steep, even for someone as familiar with technology as I am.
I'm sure I could learn how to operate a lathe at a factory within weeks. But I'm not sure a lathe operator at a factory could learn how to code within the same time frame (if at all)
So no, it isn't apples and oranges. The software revolution will leave a huge group of people permanently unemployable.
The 50 year old weaver in 1800 Manchester could learn how to operate a machine at a mill - it is largely a mechanical process, after all.
But the 50 year old truck driver in 2015 isn't going to learn how to write code - not within a reasonable time frame anyway
Your arrogance is showing. Sure, you could learn how to operate a lathe on an assembly line in a matter of weeks; in just the same way nearly any adult of average education could learn in a matter of weeks to write WordPress templates, or cobble together SQL queries, or etc. etc. To become a master machinist, the kind who can do anything with a lathe that a lathe can be asked to do? Years of dedication and expertise.
In the scope of factories in the industrial revolution, I think he's clearly referring to low-skill assembly line work, which made up the vast majority of jobs. You're referring to master craftsman. The problem with software is that there's no known way to create assembly-line-style software with lots of low skill labor. It can only be made by at least semi-skilled craftsman. Being able to cobble together an SQL query is nice, but what kind of useful product could you put out with a line of 50 people such low-skill people? None that I know of. Thus we're stuck with a lot less, higher skill jobs.
Yeah, but the software revolution doesn't require everyone to be coders, just as the industrial revolution didn't require everyone to be lathe designers.
There are definitely non-coding jobs being created by the software revolution. Cobbling together SQL queries, bashing spreadsheets together, creating graphs, cleaning up data for further processing. These are exactly the kind of things that low(ish) skilled people will be doing in the future.
The low-skill clerical type work is exactly the sort of job I work to eliminate every single day. Only the top skilled in most departments could cobble together a SQL query, do anything useful with Excel, etc. The vast majority of Office workers today cannot do what you're asking of them. They work the "assembly line" jobs in the office. Those people are needed less and less.
The problem with this is that those cobbled-together SQL queries are precisely the kinds of things good programmers either replace or automate away; you can automate away an assembly-line job, but not as cheaply, and not as easily.
There might not be any such thing as a 100x programmer or whatever, but the value proposition for replacing a few sub-par programmers with one better programmer and a framework is a lot clearer than the one for replacing a handful of assembly line workers with a more complicated and more expensive piece of machinery.
Hmm, I don’t think so. If you have a dozen similar queries, then you can factor out the similarity (say, into a view, or a Ruby subroutine that generates the SQL). If you have a thousand that vary in a lot of different ways, a few subroutines isn’t enough; you need a DSL to factor out the similarity, aka “automate away” the queries.
But then you need someone to write down the idiosyncratic bits of each query, the thing that makes it different from the other thousand, in your DSL. For a lot of systems, the right DSL is in fact SQL itself, but even if it’s not, you still need people to write in it.
In short, nonprogrammers writing cobbled-together SQL queries are the result of automating away the non-idiosyncratic aspects of the queries.
Software (in the Turing sense), removing the material complexity, accelerated the notion of automation. Easy things can be, medium-complexity too, only leaving the NP-complete stuff to be done by hand. Jobs are an endangered species.
I have coworkers whose official job title is one that involves programming and they are bad at it. I shouldn't speak for myself, but it's not that simple. If you continuously strive to advance, it means constant learning, and most people I see really can't or won't learn like that.
>You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code.
Yes, but that's because the art of application programming is (mostly) stuck in the "alchemy" era of science. There is precious little systemization of knowledge, processes, and names. All of these frameworks are actually memes competing for mind-share to be an answer to this need. Of course, having one periodic table for software would be better than having 10 competing ones.
Is the inherent complexity of the ordinary programming task (building, deploying, monitoring reactive FSMs mediating user communication) is roughly the same as chemistry? Too early to tell, but I think not.
But it seems unlikely that reducing the complexity will lead to more jobs, just better software at automating the task of making software so fewer people are needed to complete the job.
Industrial jobs required a great deal of skill until they were broken down into easy tasks and each worker learned only one task. The work of imagining, planning, and creating the Industrial Revolution occupied the greatest minds of that time.
I find it difficult to imagine "assembly lines" for software, creating coding jobs within the reach of a 50 year old truck driver, but as the tools improve, who knows.
>I find it difficult to imagine "assembly lines" for software, creating coding jobs within the reach of a 50 year old truck driver, but as the tools improve, who knows.
I see Mechanical Turk as pretty close to this idea.
> I think of myself as relatively smart but I've struggled with learning how to code.
That just speaks of the (still) poor state of tools and frameworks.
As early as last century driving a vehicle necessitated detailed knowledge of internal combustion engine and car parts. You can imagine someone from that era writing "I think of myself as relatively smart but I've struggled with learning how to drive" after yet another lecture on carburetors, crankshaft, and bearing boxes.
> You can't take any random adult and teach him how to code. It requires way higher intellect and time to master coding.
True, but that's not the only job that will be in high demand in this here "software revolution", nor is programming the best comparison to factory workers in the first place.
In the short term at least, I figure we'll see high demand for help desk and field repair technicians - two realms that are ultimately necessary for software to revolutionize anything. Eventually, the global population will likely become increasingly technologically-literate and be less dependent on human interaction in order to request support; should this occur, there will then be a shift of employment away from help desk, but I expect field repair technicians will continue to be in high demand for a very long time.
That is, until sufficiently-advanced synthetic intelligences become reality, but at that point we're all screwed, so it's kind of a moot point worrying about that :)
One of the most notable differences between the Industrial and Information revolutions is that wealth from the former was underwritten by a surge in energy. Wealth from the latter depends on extracting greater value from (more or less) existing supplies. In other words, it's largely about the sudden redistribution of output, as opposed to a change in the underlying supply.
(Relatively) enlightened governing philosophies and new economic theories aside, the Industrial Revolution also involved a monumental uptick in the amount of raw energy humans had to work with. Until this point, the latent economic power contained within fossil fuels remained out of reach. Population and productivity were both effectively capped by the amount of energy we could actually extract from the environment (e.g., caloric, in the form of crops for people and livestock as well as wind for sails and mills, along with hydro small dams and rivers for transport).
Nascent capital markets and industrial processes provided real advantages in this energy-constrained world, but adding steam then oil to the process of industrialization is what really kicked growth into overdrive. This influx of energy (and the economic growth it supported) allowed countries like England to develop populations seven or eight times greater than the agricultural carrying capacity of its arable land in astonishingly short order. The ideas of Adam Smith were important, but wouldn't have gotten nearly as far is they didn't have actual steam trains and ships to carry the people who subscribed to them.
All that said, the transition we're going through now is far from complete. Like the early and painfully disruptive days of the Industrial Revolution, the current concerns about stagnation and wealth concentration may give way once we complete another energy transition. A world supplied by highly distributed, low-cost solar and stored energy arrays (batteries, compressed air, molten salt, etc.) could see an increase in the overall supply, in a fashion that liberates a critical mass of people from the more coercive aspects of the global economy. Tapping the sun directly may prove to be as transformative as tapping ancient deposits of carbon. Indeed, the pre-existence of the information layer may prove to be the thing that makes this possible, just as the process of industrialization had begun before the steam engine kicked it into overdrive.
The big question for the long-range optimists is how do we maintain social and stability and cohesion during the transition?
No, the two revolutions are a lot more similar than you think. The industrial revolution was fueled largely by the technology to harness huge quantities of fossil fuels to power modern machinery. The underlying supply of energy didn't change - those fossil fuel reserves had been built up over hundreds of millions of years, as we're now learning (to our chagrin) a hundred years later. What did change is our ability to extract that energy from the world around us. After the industrial revolution, we woke up and found out that we had previously been literally scratching the surface of the resources available to us on this planet.
Similarly, the Information revolution has been fueled by a huge increase in our ability to collect and process data. That's allowed new means of production that use existing resources in a much more efficient way. No, there's no new energy flowing into the system - but there wasn't with the Industrial Revolution either, we just figured out how to use energy that was previously believed to be useless.
There are theoretical limits to the amount of energy our planet can generate, but if you study physics you'll see that the amount of energy extracted by human beings is roughly 1/1000th of the energy available to us [1]. The limiting factor is our technology, not the raw resources in the environment.
People from the future will likely consider the industrial and information revolutions to be the same revolution, just like people today generally consider the agricultural revolution to be one event instead of its two separate stages.
We could say the industrial revolution ended in 1945 with the Manhattan project and the information revolution began in the 1940's with the Enigma code cracking so the timelines flow into each other, and, as you say, they both had the effect of releasing vast amounts of energy. The agricultural revolution began about 10,000 yrs ago independently in 5 or 10 places around the world with plant seed selection and animal husbandry, but in only two places, North China and Mesopotamia, did they make the separate step of transplanting it all on a large scale to a river valley, perhaps even thousands of years later. (I'm presuming here Egypt and the Indus Valley copied Mesopotamia.)
I suspect the real third big revolution will be inter-stellar travel in perhaps another 10,000 years.
That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines.
It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence of today's software engineering jobs - but it destroyed a lot of jobs in agriculture and textile because you could produce more with a fraction of the labor.
To the point that people would manifest and destroy steam machines accusing them of stealing jobs (see "Luddites").
Let's not forget that what is typically called "industrial revolution" spans over a century and it took a while for the industrial revolution to create a lot of new jobs (approx the second half of the 19th century), and those new jobs were initially very poorly paid.