It’s not as bad, nor as good, as you think
Two observations:
- A robot or algorithm can only “take” a job if a human builds a robot/algorithm capable of it.
- A human can only build such a robot/algorithm if they have at least some vague notion that it won’t wildly hurt their fellow citizens, or if they are a sociopath.
There are many, many indicators of large-scale automation of millions of jobs in the near future.
“People always tell me, ‘I used to spend two out of five days a week doing this sort of thing,’ or ‘I used to have a guy whose job it was to do nothing other than this one thing,’ ’’ — Daniel Nadler, owner of FinTech startup Kensho, which apparently employed about a dozen people at the time of this article
There are further worrying indicators that the jobs we are creating are temporary.
And the labor force participation rate also appears to be declining.
The declining participation rate is also not an exclusive trend at the older end of the spectrum.
Recent and future generations are becoming less and less likely to out-earn their parents.
Meanwhile, the list of opportunities open to people whose jobs stand to be automated or simply erased altogether often boils down to minimum wage service work, government hand-outs, the freelancing / “gig” economy, and the dubious “freedom” to found their own tech startup.
(Please educate me if I have missed realistic, scalable alternatives here.)
Yet the discussion I’ve seen about this topic almost always comes from the press and rarely from the tech community that is driving much of this shift.
Disruption’s not for everyone. Talk to your doctor to find out if disruption is right for you. But it’s also not the plague, being inflicted on us by some invisible force. It’s all just people. People can plan, and people can change.
Pride cometh before a fall
I have never heard much satisfactorily realistic, action-oriented discussion from the tech community about solving for the other side of the disruption equation, the part where you make sure large numbers of people don’t become homeless while you’re busy building the technology to let anyone (read: wealthy people) live forever in the nightmarish hellscape of an unplanned post-labor-scarcity society. The possibility that technology might replace more jobs than it creates is waved off by many as crazy neo-Luddite-ism. Frankly, I think we’ve focused for too long on flying the rocket ship as fast as we can to wherever it leads. Consequences be damned. As if jamming our foot permanently on the technological accelerator will get us to Magic Utopia World faster, rather than crashing us into an asteroid we couldn’t see coming. We didn’t do a great job predicting climate change 100 years ago, and in some ways we’re better at fooling ourselves with statistics and irrelevant historical data now than we were then.
Sure, there are overtures here or there about tech retraining and wealth redistribution via a universal basic income. But those efforts are often unrealistic and fall far short of what’s needed. At least some are trying, and I applaud their efforts. But before you pat yourself on the back too hard, 1) it is basically acknowledged that there are gaping holes in the current proposals, and 2) there is almost no sense of urgency in finding better ones. See: the plan for UBI linked above that completely punts on the difficulty of including children in their unrealistic calculations and hasn’t been updated since 2014.
(Again, if you think I’m wrong, tell me more! I’d love to be wrong on this point!)
While some might consider me an anarcho-capitalist for my views on the proper role of government in society, I also don’t believe that the rules of capitalism were written in stone by brilliant wizards long ago, never to be questioned. Universal basic income payments, minimum wage hikes, caps on income/wealth based on a percentage of GDP, bans on over-complicated and poorly understood financial instruments, and aggressive anti-trust enforcement are all on the table for me, if they work (crucially, NOT if they only APPEAR to work, or simply FEEL GOOD). Likewise, massive deregulation and privatization, lowering of tax rates, dissolving of the TBTF banks, and enforcement of a balanced budget are also on the table for me, subject to the same constraints.
We have many “thought leaders” who essentially believe that we’ll be fine with an unprecedented $20 trillion national debt because we’re almost there now, and “everything looks great from here!”
Some believe that automation poses no serious threat because we’ve automated many things in the past without persistent negative consequence. This cognitive bias of projecting the present situation forward into the future with only minor possible fluctuation earned us the Great Recession which we are still recovering from. Hilariously, the people who engineered the collapse or, at minimum, failed to see it coming, faced no negative consequences, still hold massive power, and see no irony in telling us what we should do or worry about!
This is what’s referred to by some, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan”, and Christopher Cole of Artemis Capital Management, as being “short volatility,” i.e. believing that nothing will change substantially tomorrow based on statistical/historical forecasts made today. If you’re interested in a dense look at the topic, this is an excellent paper from Cole entitled “Volatility and the Allegory of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.”
This way of thinking is perhaps best illustrated by the turkey problem: namely, that the turkey thinks its life is spectacular, that its master cares for its well-being, and that it has nothing to fear. It has all kinds of reasons and anecdotes supporting this belief, like being fed every day, being treated well, and never seeing the blade coming. That is, until Thanksgiving.
We have a lot of turkey problems in the world today. We have people who are so vehement about the veracity of their positions, you’d think they’d read them from a message in the clouds, written by the gods. They’re quick to decry “fake news” while sucking down the exhaust fumes of a press that utterly failed to predict the 2007 crash, Brexit, and the Trump presidency. This, despite many of them having only the most rudimentary grasp of the foundations of these ideas, and the inconvenient reality that their unflinching devotion to those ideas is often based primarily on the voting habits and social circle of their most recent author.
And now for something completely different…
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States was a shock to many, myself included. It will inevitably mean a great many things for our country. I’m still holding out as much hope as I can that the net result will be positive. From where I’m sitting, the current indications we have aren’t terribly encouraging on the robot overlord front. But it’s abundantly clear that this will be the administration in which we either address the challenges posed by massive technological disruptions in our society head-on, or set out on a path toward permanent self-delusion.
Andy Puzder, CEO of the company that owns Carl’s Jr. and Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary, has caught a lot of flack for hinting that he might want to completely automate humans out of his restaurants if large minimum wage hikes are implemented. Others in the fast food world have voiced similar support of automation. It seems Puzder did not get this idea from some evil book of dystopian science fiction. He got it from a human-interaction-free restaurant called Eatsa in San Francisco. Granted, the vision he was inspired by did not include a conditional about the minimum wage. But the implicit goal of the chain is to reduce food prices by getting rid of costly humans (aka “democratizing access to nutritional food”).
“With our unique technology, we can provide better food, faster, and at an unprecedented price of just $6.95,”
That sounds like a Sillicon Valley PR-friendly version of what Puzder and co. are proposing, albeit with quinoa instead of burgers and fries.
LESSON: One must take ownership of one’s ideas, packaging them in an effective, ethical form and winning in the marketplace, if one wishes to influence how those ideas are assimilated into the culture.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and a member of Trump’s transition team, is a big fan of building technological monopolies. He discusses his thesis in some detail in the book “Zero to One,” which I highly recommend. I don’t believe his ideas are without their merits. It must be said, the monopolies he envisions are much gentler than the U.S. Steels and Standard Oils of yesteryear. However, I think it’s fair to say that if realized on a large scale, they would have a disproportionately positive impact on one small part of society, and at best a neutral impact on most Americans. That is, until we’re using dirt, rainbows, and sunshine to produce hotdogs and pills that make you not die from eating too many hot dogs (a concept my favorite futurist, James Burke, calls the “3D nanofabricator”).
While tech companies are currently tripping over themselves to make promises not to build Muslim registries or help with mass deportations, not enough voices are saying to the tech companies that could easily enable such large-scale oppression, “We told you not to recklessly collect data without limit. We told you not to let the tendrils of advertising into every facet of online life. We told you there would be consequences. You did this in the service of greed and hubris, and now others will pay the price.” It never occurred to many people that Facebook and Google make amazing tools for surveillance and social control. They bought the pernicious lie that, “if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.” In my mind, this mirrors the collective blindness or ambivalence to the risks of technological disruption.
Just like the country bumpkins they mock that can’t be bothered to learn how the greenhouse effect or evolution works, many tech overlords can’t be bothered to truly ponder the philosophical, moral implications of their creations. They might feel icky sometimes, but all they have to do is go back to their comfy Slack bubbles to post some funny GIFs, order food that’s delivered by an out-of-work knowledge worker of a bygone era, and forget about the implications of their collective nihilism for a while longer.
Many in the tech world believe that Donald Trump is a monster, and his followers are the spawn of Satan. They believe that the angry white horde has descended upon America, and that our great country’s days are numbered.
I’ll say it here, loudly and proudly:
RACISTS, XENOPHOBES, MISOGYNISTS, HOMOPHOBES, BIGOTS, AND WOULD-BE DICTATORS OF ALL KINDS WILL RIGHTLY LOSE WHEN FACED WITH THE RESOLVE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, IF WE STICK TOGETHER AND CONTINUE OUR CENTURIES-LONG MARCH TOWARDS JUSTICE, FREEDOM, AND EQUALITY FOR ALL OF MANKIND
But.
We must tread carefully and not lose sight of the shared humanity which it is our national civic duty to protect. That includes the rights of people who voted for Donald Trump, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Hillary Clinton, and even (especially?) that one elector who voted for Ron Paul. That means thinking just as carefully about calling someone a bigot as you would about using a racial slur. Equivocating racists’ hurt feelings with minorities’ mistreatment at the hands of their (often white) haters is not my point in the least. My point is, you do not get to define anyone’s reality but your own. The best you can do is nudge someone toward thinking up their own, new reality, in which they share your values. Short of using fraud, torture, or the threat of murder, you will never succeed in instilling your worldview in another person against their will.
LESSON: Focus on being persuasive, thoughtful, and understanding, rather than loud, angry, and righteous.
I will take a brief pause here, before I look too much like a hypercritical anti-innovation nutcase, to give special mention to Tim Cook. He took a principled and unpopular stand on the privacy issues raised by the FBI’s approach in the San Bernadino iPhone case, against a president he likely agreed with on many things. And he has taken a similarly principled and unpopular stance with his willingness to engage a president with whom he probably shares little common ground.
When asked why he was going to the Trump Tower gathering of tech big-wigs, Cook had this to say:
“Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be. The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena. We engage when we agree and we engage when we disagree. I think it’s very important to do that because you don’t change things by just yelling. You change things by showing everyone why your way is the best. In many ways, it’s a debate of ideas.”
I know there are others out there who don’t share the ideas I ascribe to the tech industry. If my view appears myopic, I’ll be the first to admit that it is because it’s shaped by my own experiences, flaws, and the voices I choose to listen to. As a member of the techluminati myself, I am no more immune to bubble-thinking than anyone else. I do my best to avoid it by patiently listening to perspectives from all sides, but I am no more perfect than those I hope to win over. I am open to the possibility of being wrong about virtually everything I’ve written in this post, and I welcome any counter-examples that illustrate its failings. I am about action and progress, not talking and looking smart.
Hope and change
Many in America are fearful about their livelihoods, confused about the country that seems foreign to their memories, angered by the changes that have left them and their communities without hope. This is true for many on both sides of the aisle (and right in the middle of the aisle, for that matter).
But, in my view, if we treat this election and President-elect as a moment for unity rather than division, it might prove to be the unraveling of decades of hypocrisy borne out of a national conversation that changes its character and memory markedly every time the meaningless blue/red toggle switch is flipped.
It was difficult for liberals to rebuke Obama and Hillary Clinton on their failings, when they wanted very badly to see those particular individuals succeed because of what they represented. The “outsider” dynamic was embraced as whole-heartedly by the left as it has since been by the right, albeit with much nobler character and intentions. The idea that women and minorities needed a strong advocate and role model to “shake things up” in the Whitehouse was enchanting. The historic significance of Obama’s election and Clinton’s popular vote win, clearly marking the decline of a society long tipped toward the interests of old white men, cannot be ignored. But that feel-good glow of righteousness has enabled rational people to vote for flawed candidates without thinking or speaking critically on many of their policies. Yes, intellectual laziness exists on the Left too!
It bears mentioning that the tactics Trump used in his campaign, such as talking ad nauseum about the forgotten man and woman in America, should be quite familiar to Democrats who have for decades spoken to the minorities of this country in adoring tones, without significantly improving their lot through concrete actions such as comprehensive criminal justice reform. I say this as a white male with absolutely no pretension toward being an expert on race. All I can see is that little has changed for the better for most minorities on an institutional basis during Obama’s presidency (unless you bend over backwards to applaud the Affordable Care Act, which is not specifically targeted at minorities).
It was likewise difficult for conservatives to find the same vitriolic language for George W. Bush that they found all too easily when Bill Clinton was in power. The nation building and reckless spending that they claimed to despise became their raison d’être, forgotten behind the fever dream of Bush’s tax cuts. Some Republicans still manage to twist themselves in knots and justify the failed Iraq war in their minds. Some are similarly doing mental backflips to defend crony capitalism and Russian aggression that, until recently, they were staunchly opposed to. This cognitive dissonance is a worrying sign of the inability for rational adults in our country to understand the complexity of the issues we face in terms beyond “my guy” vs. “their guy.”
Republicans since Nixon have dog-whistled the racist white voter to their side. Donald Trump is an extreme point on a continuum of veiled distrust of “the other,” not in a league all his own. While his brand is particularly brazen, one must bear in mind that he has not wielded a moment of elected power yet. If you scream at the top of your lungs until you pass out when he says something you don’t like, what will you do when he does something you don’t? Break out the rifles and try to settle this “the way we used to”?
This hypocritical wink-and-nod liberalism/conservatism dynamic has gone on for my entire lifetime (I won’t stroke my ego by talking about anything I haven’t lived personally). I hope above all that this election will bring that haze to an end. I sense that it will not be as challenging for people of any ideological bent to criticize the Trump administration, and I hope that they will do so loudly and in force, opposing any legislation or executive action that undermines the liberties of their fellow citizens on the basis of ideas, not partisanship.
LESSON: Ideas, values, and beliefs are the important currency. Not colored banners and yardsigns.
A philosophical aside for you to ponder, if you’ll indulge me: if a family is forced to leave their home, whether because of gentrification driven by socially conscious tech liberals who would never for a moment, on pain of death, admit their fear of “the other,” or by crypto-fascist alt-right zealots spouting overt racial hatred, who buys the family a new home to live in?
To be clear: some Americans are wrong, and wrong in the most ignorant and appalling of ways, about the source of their problems, the severity of those problems, and the solutions that might fix them. But denying their pain is no better than denying anyone else’s pain, be they the family of an African American man wrongly killed by a racist police officer, a Mexican American afraid for their undocumented family’s safety, or a Muslim American family grieving from a seeming double loss, first of their son who gave his life fighting for his country, then of their very ideal of the country he died for. Everyone has their own source of pain to cope with: a soul-crushing loss of purposeful employment, loss of a loved one to addiction, disintegration of communities, the fear or reality of violence based on race, religion, or nationality, or a million other kinds of pain we would be foolish to wave away with a thoughtless “but my pain…”
What ever happened to “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? (Aside from the fact that it’s not an actual quote from Voltaire)
It’s cheap and easy to hurl insults at Trump voters as a group: hurtful, thoughtless, stubborn, poorly educated, callous, hypocritical, lazy, lacking culture and moral fiber. It’s even easier if you don’t know any of them, or shun those you do know in favor of your better-mannered, more-intelligent, coast-dwelling friends. It’s easier still if you never ask, “Might I have those negative qualities at times as well? Am I really as smart and informed as I think I am?” But we must try to see them as the flawed humans they are, on an individual level. Just as they must try to see their fellow citizens for the flawed humans THEY are, not through the lens of prejudice and fear. They still hold American citizenship, and unless a civil war breaks out or California secedes, they’ll likely remain Americans until they die. We’re all in this together, so we ought to try to get along.
As many pundits have said before me, Trump voters used the ballot box to demand that their concerns be heard, over the frantic objections and insults of their detractors. Again, the racially divisive strategy Trump used was pulled, with minimal stylistic changes, right from the Republican playbook. It’s important to note, however, that many civil rights activists have used norms-breaking tactics throughout history to advocate for their ideas in ways that were unpopular, too. It is the height of hypocrisy to applaud whatever-it-takes tactics to further your own ends, while sanctimoniously critiquing them when used against you by your opponent. They are either acceptable for everyone, or for no one. Be sure that when you weaponize some new tactic to push your viewpoint, you are prepared for it to be used in ways you didn’t intend.
Sadly, many Americans and those who seek the American dream will lose their shot at that dream if the policies espoused by Donald Trump are enacted whole-cloth without compassion. We must all remember not to judge our neighbors too harshly. We must take action when we see true injustice. We must not allow the color of our skin, the geographic region we inhabit, the candidate we voted for, the balance in our bank account, the place we worship at or the lack thereof, or anything else, to stymie our efforts to unite and stand up for the rights of ALL Americans when they are threatened. We must find solutions to problems that affect middle America most viscerally, not ignore them and hope that they die off quietly.
We are each individually responsible for what we do in this life. Free speech is not free in the sense that it behooves us to use it in vile ways to illustrate its lack of limitations. Free speech is free because we humans have the capacity to limit ourselves without being told how to do so by a paternalistic government, and to use our words to further our ideas based on their merits, not their volume.
This may seem like a digression, but bear with me for a moment: I believe strongly that the oil industry of today will not survive my generation’s lifetime, regardless of the policies enacted by the next President. This used to be taken for granted by many: peak oil was right around the corner and things were going to go pear-shaped fast. Being from Texas, I got my first toy oil derrick at age 8, and have been drilling recklessly in endangered wildlife habitats and national forests ever since. Jokes aside, I actually know people in the oil business, and they’re no better or worse than anyone else I know. That said, I still believe climate change is real and that their industry contributes significantly. However, I don’t thoughtlessly hurl ad hominems their way from the seat of my dead-dinosaur-powered car when I see them on the street, or using my cell phone or laptop that are largely powered by coal and natural gas. I’ve never once heard a coal miner, rig operator, or oil tanker driver, in any context, drone on at length about the lovely and clean nature of the fuel source that they work to provide. They almost universally talk about the utilitarian benefit of those fuels, despite their flaws, just like the tech crowd does with their every new invention.
We have heads of government agencies who don’t seem to get what the “big deal” is with using a private email server to conduct state business. We have law enforcement officials who seem to want encryption to “grow up and stop hanging out with such a bad crowd.” We have major government agencies and companies being hacked in ways that beggar belief (and I’m only talking about the ones that we know happened for sure!)
We can ignore it, we can deny it, but we have to own up to it eventually: the “innovation economy” produces brilliant, inspiring new things that the world at large is not always prepared to contextualize in an ideal way, and we often make no effort to help them do so.
Why should we listen to you?
If I have one primary goal with this post, it is to soften the rhetoric of a vicious battle I’ve seen occurring in our discourse since the election in November. I consider myself woefully under-qualified to speak to these concerns of mine with the eloquence and even-handedness they deserve. But my increasing discontent at not seeing them coherently expressed more widely has left me with the options of either inactivity, or throwing my hat into the ring and hoping for the best. I am particularly critical of tech because it is a community I am intimately familiar with personally, and fascinated by as a potential engine to grow our way out of our current problems, if we are thoughtful and careful about how we do so.
It is my belief that the dual factors of automation and outsourcing played a huge role in our election this year, and we would be foolish to continue ignoring alarming labor trends that show no signs of abating. Americans must get over political bickering about a President-elect who likes to fire controversial statements from the hip to promote his brand, and start addressing real problems.
So… now what?
I’ve given a pretty exhausting list of accusations and criticisms here with onl a few “lessons,” and you might reasonably ask, “what should we do instead, genius?” Here are my thoughts, incomplete and flawed as they are.
Build better businesses. Be ethical when nobody’s looking. Be fantastically profitable by being fantastically valuable. When you see someone like Puzder propose a human-free restaurant, compete with him in the marketplace with a hybrid model that combines the human touch with mechanical efficiency to allow 24-hour operation, handled in alternating 12-hour shifts between humans and robots. Pay the money made through increased efficiency back to the workers.
Donate more than usual to good causes. I happen to be partial to the the ACLU, the EFF, and GiveDirectly’s Universal Basic Income experiment. I find the idea of funding experiments particularly exciting, because not only do I (ideally) help someone else directly, but the world at large may benefit from the knowledge learned by studying the experiment’s success or failure.
Stop insulting others’ beliefs before you question your own. You may find that the basis of your knowledge and beliefs is not as pure as you thought, even though the knowledge itself seems pure. Appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy, even if that authority agrees with you and has a Harvard PhD.
Have skin in the game. Ask yourself when you think you’re helping someone else, “what am I sacrificing with this action?” Often, there is a strong correlation between what you give up in service to others, and what it is worth to them in return. That means that if your idea of activism consists only of strongly-worded tweetstorms, change.org petitions, and people you unfriended on Facebook, to quote Khizr Khan, “YOU HAVE SACRIFICED NOTHING!” For anyone keeping score at home, that means that I fully acknowledge that this whole screed of mine earns me exactly 0 righteous outrage points or smug disapproval tokens.
To quote Gary Vaynerchuk, one of my business heroes, “no one gives a fuck about your feelings.” Get out there and, like Gandhi said, “be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Most importantly, keep in mind an idea that seems to have fallen out of fashion lately, but has survived the long test of time up to now: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. No matter the cost.
