Tag Archives: productivity

The post-scarcity world

The number of articles which are now talking about the problem of work are increasing. Techcrunch cites many of them in a recent article  pointing out the productivity conundrum in the US; the economy is slowly bouncing back, but the jobs just aren’t coming back with growth as they usually do.

Henry Blodget points out “Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades.” The New York Times observes “The jobless rate remains far higher than it typically would be this far into a recovery,” quoting a factory owner: “Because it is automated, we won’t have to add a lot of employees with the upturn in the construction industry.”

There is a lot of doom and gloom around as I’ve written here centred on the rise of technology and its replacement of increasing numbers of jobs.

Even lawyers, financiers, and surgeons aren’t safe. The Economist observes “Intelligent machines have reached a new social frontier: knowledge workers are now in the eye of the storm … teachers, researchers and writers are next.” And in the City of London, arguably the world’s primary nexus of finance, “analysts expect [banking] job losses to keep on coming, as technology replaces jobs that people once did.”

The Techcrunch article is the first I’ve read, though, that points out the potential of all this automation.

..technology may be destroying jobs, but it’s also creating wealth; and as I’ve argued before, the endgame of all this wealth creation, some generations hence, isn’t a world of full employment. Instead it’s a post-scarcity world of no employment, as we understand the word. Fewer and fewer jobs coexisting with more and more wealth is exactly what you would expect on the road to that outcome. 

However, the conclusion isn’t the only one imaginable:

So the good news is, if you lose your job some years from now, with any luck the same technological advances that devour it will also have generated enough wealth that the government will pay you and your family a basic income while you’re unemployed. The bad news is that you’re not likely to get another long-term job–ever–and that basic income will probably be only just enough to scrape by on.

If we learn to adjust to less work maybe we will spread out what is there more evenly (though there isn’t much evidence of this happening yet) and eventually wean ourselves off work as we know it altogether. The utopian world of The Culture could yet come to pass.

The second half of the chessboard

I’ve just come across a very interesting concept in a podcast of Peter Day interviewing Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of The Race Against the Machine

They mentioned the famous legend about the origin of chess: When the inventor of the game showed it to the emperor of India, the emperor was so impressed by the new game, that he said to the man: Name your reward.” The man responded that he was a humble man with simple wishes: “Give me one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the next square, four for the next, eight for the next and so on for all 64 squares, with each square having double the number of grains as the square before.” The emperor agreed, amazed that the man had asked for such a small reward – or so he thought. After a week, his treasurer came back and informed him that the reward would add up to an astronomical sum, far greater than all the rice that could conceivably be produced in many many centuries. 

In fact, according to Wikipedia, the total number of grains would equal 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, which is “a much higher number than most people intuitively expect”.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out that the effect in the second half of the chessboard is much more dramatic than the first: in the 32nd square the amount of rice is still relatively manageable. But after that each square doubles an already large number and quickly this outstrips human intuition. 

Brynjolfsson and McAfee say this same effect is happening with technology. Moore’s Law says technology power will double every 18 months or so and the effect of this again gets very much more significant “in the second half of the chessboard”. They calculate that we’ve had around 32 “squares” of exponential growth in technology and that now the 18 month advances are very much more dramatic than previously and this effect will increase dramatically (dramatic squared, if you like!). 

This is the reason behind the really quite remarkable advances in computing and robotics which is having the effect described in their book. “How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy”, as the subtitle puts it.