{"id":133198,"date":"2010-01-03T22:20:42","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T03:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.feld.com\/wp\/archives\/2010\/01\/the-lights-in-the-tunnel.html"},"modified":"2010-01-03T22:20:42","modified_gmt":"2010-01-04T03:20:42","slug":"the-lights-in-the-tunnel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/133198","title":{"rendered":"The Lights in the Tunnel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I read a fascinating book yesterday called The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future<\/em><\/a>\"\" by Martin Ford.  I can\u2019t remember who sent it to me (someone did \u2013 thank you); it appeared on the of my infinite pile of books so I gobbled it down as my first book at 2010.<\/p>\n

The first half of the book sets up the situation and the corresponding problems.  I agreed with much of the first half.  The second half proposes a solution.  I had a hugely difficult time with it.  Ford anticipated this as he regularly acknowledged (unnecessarily) throughout the second half that many people would have a hard time with his proposed solution.  Yet he marched on relentlessly.<\/p>\n

Ford\u2019s basic premise is as follows:<\/p>\n

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\u201cAt some point in the future \u2013 it might be many years or decades from now \u2013 machines will be able to do the jobs of a large percentage of the \u2018average\u2019 people in our population, and these people will not<\/u> be able to find new jobs.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ford does a good job of spending the first half of this book making the case for this.  He draws nicely from the notion of a technological singularity<\/a> (which many of us are now calling simple \u201cthe singularity\u201d for convenience), explains why mainstream economists (and the notion of econometrics in general) are basically historians rather than effective predictors of the future, does a nice job weaving the Luddite Fallacy<\/a> into the mix,  makes a compelling argument about China\u2019s role in this he calls the \u201cChina Fallacy\u201d, and wraps it up by revisiting a variety of conventional views of the future while asking \u201cdo we really believe they are going to play out this way?\u201d (answer = no).<\/p>\n

At this point I took a break and went for a walk around the block with my dogs.  I knew the book was shifting from \u201cproblem\u201d to \u201csolution\u201d (the next chapter was titled Transition<\/em>) and I wanted to clear my mind so I could absorb it. I had a couple of weak ideas about where Ford was going to go, but it was pretty fuzzy to me.  So I dove back in.<\/p>\n

The second half of the book blew me away.  Ford starts by asserting underlying his mental model \u2013 that in the future 75% unemployment will permanently exist because jobs will have been automated away \u2013 and they will not be replaceable.  So \u2013 the vast majority of people in our society will be \u201cunemployable\u201d in a conventional sense (as in a 40 hour \/ week job).  Ford asks rhetorically \u201cIs it possible to have a prosperous economy and a civil society in such a scenario?\u201d (answer = yes and he\u2019s going to propose a way to do it.)<\/p>\n

The base on which he builds his solution is the following idea:<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe will have to undergo a quantum shift in our value system.  In order to preserve the free market system, we will have to come to the realization that while work (at least for most people) may no longer be essential, broad-based consumption is essential<\/u>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He then spends the balance of the book explaining a government-driven taxation and incentive approach that taxes companies based on their permanently lost wages (based on automation, which he asserts will increase gross margins) while incenting the unemployed to act in ways that benefit themselves and societies by paying them based on how they act and contribute in this \u201cnon-traditional job\u201d way.  Ford suggests several simple categories, including Education (self and others), Community and Civic Activities, Journalism, and the Environment.  He then spends a lot of time explaining the implementation at a high level, including an abstract example of how a functioning free-market society could exist post the singularity.<\/p>\n

Sometime during reading this stuff my brain exploded and I had to go take the dogs for another walk.  When I came back, I tried to explain this to Amy<\/a> but couldn\u2019t.  I tried to make the argument that all government employees (local, state, and federal) are already in this category so the jump from the federally reported 10% unemployment to 75% isn\u2019t as big as we might think since 8% already work for the government<\/a> (so let\u2019s say the jump is from 20% to 75%).  I couldn\u2019t do it \u2013 I just couldn\u2019t take myself seriously.<\/p>\n

While I love Ford\u2019s tenacity with the idea and radical approach, I think this book would have worked better as science fiction rather than an attempt at an economic \/ political essay.  Ironically, I might have been able to buy the argument better in the context of science fiction; when put against the backdrop of our existing social \/ societal construct, it was too difficult for me to absorb. <\/p>\n

I have a belief that the structure of what we call \u201cmodern society\u201d will have to change post singularity.  I don\u2019t yet have my own hypothesis for what this looks like, but many of my favorite science fiction writers have been hacking away at this for several decades.  And I\u2019m continuing to slurp down as much stuff as I can about the singularity since I both (a) believe it will happen in my lifetime \u2013 assuming I live a normal life expectancy and (b) I hope I\u2019ll be involved in helping create it.  <\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be following Ford\u2019s blogging at his site econfuture: Future Economics and Technology<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>Even though I struggled with his solution, it\u2019s another interesting input for me to ponder. And all of this also led me (via an article titled Martin Ford Asks: Will Automation Lead to Economic Collapse?<\/em><\/a>) to a fun new website called Singularity Hub<\/a> <\/em>which has now been added to my feedreader.  Now, time for some more Philip K. Dick.<\/p>\n

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I read a fascinating book yesterday called The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford.  I can\u2019t remember who sent it to me (someone did \u2013 thank you); it appeared on the of my infinite pile of books so I gobbled it down as my first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}