Ryan may be the first non-cyclist in the history of the internet to understand this dynamic.
UPDATE: Ryan informs me that he’s not actually a non-cyclist. It turns out that there still has never been a non-bike-owning blogger who has expressed sympathy for or solidarity with cyclists. Apologies for the error.
Yes! Well, okay, Ryan doesn’t think so. You should go read that post and the Greg Clark column that prompted this discussion, although I have a feeling I’m about to quote a lot of Ryan’s entry:
Machine and robotic resources aren’t free; they’re resource constrained just like everything else is resource constrained. We have the tecnological know-how to replace millions of human workers with machines right now, but we don’t because the expense of building, programming, operating, and maintaining the machines is too great. It’s not worth it. As demand for human labour falls, the price of human labour will also fall making the hiring of humans more attractive. Meanwhile, as demand for robot labour increases, the price of robot labour will also increase (since the stuff robots are made of is scarce), making the use of a robot for any given task less attractive. There will then be some market equilibrium which will, in all likelihood, involve plenty of employment for low skilled workers.
This all seems generally correct, but only very generally. It strikes me that the same argument could have been made about the job security of horses at the dawn of the age of the automobile. And sure, there are still plenty of horses around, but I think you’d have to attribute that to a pretty generous horse-subsidization scheme.
Ryan lists a couple of constraints on mechanization:
One is the analytical constraint — there are some human cognitive and physical processes that we haven’t yet learned to emulated in machines. This will continue to be less binding over time, enabling workers to potentially compete with humans in a steadily broader range of fields.
Certainly some subset of tasks currently performed by humans will be difficult to automate for a long time yet. But not only will technology improve, as Ryan acknowledges, but we can simply eliminate many tasks that are resistant to automation. A computer can’t have a conversation with a person the way that a customer service representative can. But instead of resigning themselves to this fact, businesses have simply moved to eliminate this class of commercial interaction, substituting for it with websites, IVR systems and brutal indifference.
Then there is the energy constraint. Machines require power to operate, and the more machines we build, the more power they’ll need. This constraint might eventually be overcome, but until then energy costs will rise with the machine share of the labour force, helping to keep humans at work.
I think this is overstated. It’s a real issue, sure, but it takes energy to run a clerk, too — it’s just that it has to be slowly collected from the sun over a period of months, then the resulting chemical artifact collected, processed, shipped, stocked, sold and prepared. That cost is going to have to be covered by the clerk’s salary, and on a per work-unit basis it’s going to be a lot higher than burning coal somewhere and shoving the electrons into a high-tension wire. And this doesn’t even account for the fact that our outrageous social norms demand that the business owner pay to power the clerk even when he’s not making the firm any money.
And then there is the materials constraint. So long as it costs money to build things out of other things, it will be difficult and costly to scale up the machine share of the labour force.
Raw materials seem to be holding pretty steady — in the last few years we’ve seen a noticeable blip in prices of copper and a few other things, and I admit I don’t feel qualified to assess the scare stories about peak chromium/lithium/whatever that arise from time to time. But in general I don’t think there’s much indication that supplies of automation-enabling materials will limit further mechanization. The raw inputs — metal, motors, plastics, microchips — are already produced at enormous scale for many other sectors. If demand for automation products spikes, those resources can probably be reallocated without any enormous price shocks.
Besides, raw materials just don’t make up that much of the price tag for this stuff. A large chunk of the cost is the engineering effort that goes into it, which is a knowledge product and therefore not something we can think of as subject to quite the same constraints as physical materials. As patents expire and as modularity and abstraction spread, I think the absolute price of automation technology is likely to continue to drop. You only have to look at the rise of Roomba to see that robots have been getting dramatically cheaper at a rapid clip. Certainly the burden of proof should rest with those who contend otherwise.
The crucial thing to realize about all this is that the less-than-fully-automated status quo is not proof that we’ve reached an equilibrium. There are cultural hurdles to overcome, for one thing. These days if I order a sandwich at Wawa, I do so through a computerized interface. Could this have been done fifteen years ago? Sure, probably — maybe not with a fancy touchscreen, but pictographic buttons would’ve gotten the job done. I don’t think that my grandparents’ generation would’ve liked that, though, and I doubt that Wawa wanted to be the first chain to bet on such an approach.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s also the case that the size of the total, cross-societal capital investment that we’re talking about is pretty large. It seems reasonable to me to expect that it may take businesses decades to finance the purchase of as many robots as they should optimally have. It’s a complicated undertaking for a business, and in many cases the specific, non-technological design of the systems is still being worked out. Consider automated parking garages: the necessary technologies — magstripe cards, vending machines, robotic gates — have existed for a long time, but the pay-near-the-exit kiosk setup seems to only have emerged in the last decade or two as the best way to organize it all. Or look at McDonald’s: they’ve been experimenting with automation technology for at least a decade, slowly rolling out fry-loading machines and the like. Does anyone doubt that the basic technologies for robotic burger assembly already exist? But the firm’s got a profitable business to run, and franchisees are no doubt slow to finance these upgrades; there’s no hurry. It took decades to complete the electrification of the country, and its robotification — which promises gradual economic benefits rather than immediate quality of life improvements — may take even longer.
Broadly, I’m sure that Ryan’s right: there’ll be an equilibrium reached at some point. But I don’t see much indication that we’re there yet, and it seems conceivable that wages for unskilled human labor at that equilibrium point will be below the threshold that’s necessary for funding a minimally-acceptable existence (some would argue that this is already the case). I’m no economist, but it seems like weird things are likely to occur as labor costs are converted to capital costs, and an unavoidable shift toward a vast welfare state seems like a totally plausible possibility to me.
The good news is that this can be inferred to be more or less what happened in the world of Star Trek*, and that seems to have worked out okay.
* Though of course our perspective on the matter is distorted by the focus on Starfleet
YOU SAY ARTISTS, I SAY STARFLEET: Ezra weighs in. Also check the unhyperlinkable comment by “thedavidmo” about how standards of living will be higher in our robot-filled future. Yes! And that’s not even counting the benefits to be had by reducing the per capita level of toil. Not that I’ll be alive for a revolutionary reduction in necessary work, mind you, but I think there’s a decent chance of seeing many businesses move to a 4-day work week, which will leave the total number of hours worked mathematically pristine, but which in practice will mean a whole lot less time spent on (or thinking about) the job.
I was surprisingly surprised to lose money in Atlantic City. Yes, this is self-evidently dumb. But I thought I had prepared myself. I’m no card counter, but I had logged a decent number of hours practicing on my phone, learning the charts while trying to absorb the statistical futility of the undertaking. I was still a little fuzzy at the edges — what to do with a 12, how many fractions of a percentage point favored the house — but these were marginal bits of knowledge. I was confident that I was ready for the tables.
But wow! My last encounter with a blackjack dealer had stunned me with its speed; I was sure that the same thing couldn’t happen again, at least not with the same viciousness. But it did! Three more times! The algorithm I’d enjoyed mastering suddenly seemed dully mechanical, and I started glowering around the room for the waitress who was supposed to be bringing my drink — that consolation having more to do with it being free than the alcohol it contained. I was never up, and barely paused on my way down.
This is all hopelessly naive of me, I know. I’d fooled myself into thinking that a flipped coin ought to produce even results over, if not a sample of 2, then at least a period smaller than my bankroll divided by the minimum bet at the table. I am assured by statisticians, some of whom I am dating, that this is not actually the case.
On Saturday afternoon, in a wild-west-themed casino, I put an exasperated final $80 down on a table manned by an older Asian man who would sing out “Yoo hoo!” every time someone drew 21. In this supportive atmosphere I managed to win back enough money to upgrade my net position from “horrifying” to merely “worst-case” — just enough to redeem my faith in gambling, of course. But it was not a profitable weekend.
It was still a good weekend, though. Not for the food and wine part of the ludicrous food and wine junket, mind you — you’ll hear nary an unkind word from my bought-and-paid-for ass over at the nominal excuse for this trip, but suffice it to say that I would not recommend the festival to a friend, unless for some reason that friend had expressed an interest in paying $30 to stand in line.
It was fun to see some food celebrities, though (I was *this close* to Emeril! I couldn’t see him, but the aroma of sweated-out cajun spices was unmistakable). And Atlantic City seems more plausibly non-seedy every time I go. Nothing changes between visits, mind you, but the elderly slot jockeys recede further from my mental foreground, making the whole thing merely tasteless rather than crushingly depressing.
Surprisingly, the most fun part of the weekend had nothing to do with losing hundreds of dollars. On Saturday Emily and I met up with our friends Tara and John Carlos, who were in town for Tara’s sister’s big family birthday blowout. They’d rented an Indian-themed room inside the blues-themed concert venue in the New Orleans-themed casino, which was both cooler and more aesthetically cohesive than you might expect.
The party was a bit weird. Tara is not really comfortable in her family’s scene, which I can understand but which is too bad because the scene is kind of awesome. It’s admittedly a little strange to see a guy who could easily — easily! — pass as a wiseguy extra on the Sopranos chatting with his daughter’s overtanned and impossibly-provocatively-dressed friends. But it’s all in good fun, and seemingly not an inappropriate amount of fun, except maybe for the really drunk guy who’d apparently just had a stroke a couple of weeks before. It’s Jersey high society, basically, and I say that without derision. Like Tara, I could never feel wholly comfortable in that social milieu, but it was sort of heartwarming to observe it and see how happy its participants seemed to be.
Still, we decided we weren’t on board for the “c’mooon, you gotta daaaaance” part of the evening, though, and decamped to the first non-casino destination of the weekend. We’d spent some time googling for “real atlantic city”, “locals bar atlantic city” and the like, and had come up with three candidates. I can’t recall the name of the first one, but its nickname was “the Blood Pit” and it seemed to no longer exist. The second was the Pic-a-lilli Pub, about which Time Out New York gushed:
Affectionately referred to as “the Pick” by its mirthless denizens, this bar has the feel of an Otto Dix painting. The drinks are cheap ($2.50 bottles), the patrons are local, and the chances are fair to middling that you will hear an ’80s rock pastiche from the jukebox at some point during the evening.
This sounded promising, but we were a little hungry and so instead headed to Tony’s Baltimore Grill, a pizza joint with a 24-hour bar in the front. It was a great decision.
It was a little off-putting to come through the doors, because the whole bar turned to briefly regard us. I hurried to a booth, trying to keep a low profile, but we soon realized this wasn’t really a problem: it’s just that nearly every person to enter the bar was met with cheering and applause in the sort of way that I used to assume only happened in bars filmed before a live studio audience.
The bar turned out to be filled with raucous twenty- and thirty-somethings, only a few of whom seemed to be off duty from the casinos. There was lots of yelling; sometimes exclamations spread through the bar just for the sheer hell of it. Dudes would get into almost-fights, but all it took was a few moments of separation by a grizzled bartender to remind them that actually they loved each other, man. The bar staff started throwing coasters, and then some other people started throwing coasters, and the perfect, perfect, perfect one pictured above hit me in the face. The thrower was mortified — I said “really that’s alright” but he insisted I pound my beer so that he could buy me another one, and who was I to defy local custom? The matronly waitresses looked on from their perch at the register, wary but content that things were going more or less according to plan.
Lager was $2.50 a pint, the pizza wasn’t great but had its cheese broiled to crisp brown deliciousness, and everything was just right. Well, alright, the jukebox could use some work. But really, next time you’re in Atlantic City you should consider losing a ton of money and then buying yourself some very cheap beer. Tony’s Baltimore Grill. Don’t tell them I sent you.
The Postal Service is dying, and I guess that’s sort of sad except for how much I despise everything about mail.
Most of the accounts of paper mail’s decline explain it by pointing to the advantages of electronic communication. And it’s true: email and the phone have the edge in terms of both speed and cost. But most commentators ignore one of their biggest advantages, which is that modern communication mediums outperform the mail by not being terrible and useless.
It is, I admit, sometimes pleasant to find an envelope whose little tear-off sides hint that a check is waiting. But ignoring that specific case for a moment: what does mail do for me? For the most part, it’s nothing more than a string of obligations — and worse, ones that are hidden within a stream of cynical and dishonest commercial appeals, many of them specifically designed to trick me both by their packaging and their contents (credit monitoring sounds great! and look, the credit card company is sending me checks to use!).
Yet mail can’t be ignored, because it’s the de facto — and often de jure — system for notifying individuals of events that may ultimately have serious legal or financial consequences. If I’ve been sending an electronic bill payment to the wrong address, or am supposed to report for jury duty, or forgot to sign my tax return, the mail is the only place that I’ll hear about it before the cable stops working or a deputy shows up.
But use of the mail for this vital function has been made more difficult at a steady clip as solicitations have become a bigger and bigger portion of each user’s daily haul. It’s gotten to the point where I almost never receive a replacement credit card the first time it’s sent to me. The envelopes that carry such cards are, for obvious reasons, not clearly labeled, and so they wind up torn in half and in the trash. It isn’t until I notice an expired card, call the company and make a mental note to start opening envelopes that the situation is resolved.
The reduction of home delivery to five days per week won’t change this, of course, but if it represents a step toward the destruction of the mail as our society’s official communication medium, I’m all for it. Messages about events that could impact my finances or freedom shouldn’t be transmitted via a channel that’s mostly filled with advertising. Instead we ought to be using a medium that’s legally protected from commercial intrusion — there are desperately few, but mobile phones come to mind, and cryptographically signed email could work. Really, almost anything would be better than burying important messages amidst advertisements designed to look like important messages.
Tim Lee has a new blog. You should read it! Tim’s one of the smartest thinkers-about-technology that I know. But I have less and less time for RSS these days, and one of the worst consequences has been an inability to keep track of what he’s been writing about, spread as it was among a number of group blogs. I’m excited to have him publishing in a single place, at least for a while.
(Though he really shouldn’t declare thin clients a historical loser — like any hardware-loving geek I tend to come down on the fat client side of the debate, but what is the tech press’s beloved cloud computing other than thin client computing with HTML instead of X?).
Well, I don’t know. Sommer wrote a great review of the newly-released Nextbus iPhone app. I went ahead and bought it, and you know what? It’s worth three bucks. I’m not sure I can or should undercut the effort. Besides, one of their developers showed up in comments and stated that they’re willing to work with developers via their (not publicly disclosed) API. I’ve been emailing back and forth with him, and it’s clear that they’re willing to let people use their data if they enter into royalty agreements.
So I can either duplicate functionality (but try to do things slightly better — unlikely, given my lack of iPhone development experience) or I could try to anonymously release a free, quick-hit application that undercuts Nextbus’s slightly dodgy inclination to charge Metro, then turn around and charge the people who fund Metro. But doing that would certainly violate the license surrounding their data, and they’d get the app pulled and/or break whatever interface I cook up.
At the moment I’m leaning toward collecting data over a set period of time, then analyzing how badly Metro does at arriving at each stop on time. But doing that would require matching GTFS stops to Nextbus stops, which isn’t easy.
So tell me, Nextbus-iPhone-app-users: is there anything you wish the app did that it doesn’t? Or should I content myself with the above-proposed navel-gazing?
This Iran proxy network thingy seems deeply suspicious to me. A tech journalist friend seems to think it’s legit, and I suppose I’ll admit that it’s too early to say. But I have a lot of questions:
