Zero Marginal Productivity Workers

Flashback to the industrial revolution…

“Child labor is the future of factory production. Adult workers will be unnecessary and they will not be able to find work. We need to get ready for the modern child-labor economy.”

We don’t need child labor. There are good reasons not to have child labor.

Can you make that analogy more explicit? Is child labor wrong only because it competes with adult labor? Or is automation wrong because it’s exploiting vulnerable robots and depriving them or a more innocent youth?

I don’t see how child labor is a relevant comparison to automation.

They certainly do, but probably more often in the boardrooms than on the factory floors.

I don’t agree. Automation of manual processes has been evolving for at least 200 years yet unemployment rates have not progressively risen. The biggest transition was during the industrial revolution. What that showed is that the end result is that a) productivity rises and people start buying more stuff b) jobs start transitioning to higher skill jobs (making, programming and overseeing the machines responsible for automation process)

The most important policy decisions that need to be made are in terms of education and training - we have to make sure that the workforce is able to cope with with the higher level jobs. By and large, the people struggling in first world nations nowadays are those without the skills and training to cope with higher level jobs. UX designers, for example, are massively in demand, as are instructional designers, in the UK right now - there isn’t enough people to fill these jobs. This goes for engineers and many other trades too.

Only on the factory floor. They need to buy the equipment from a high tech manufacturer. They need to use software packages to track and control production, to monitor their ever more complex financial operations, and for all sorts of other things, and someone needs to build and maintain those.They need digital marketers, tele-salespeople, and I.T. departments to mange their I.T infrastructure.

If you have any good evidence that ZMP workers are on the rise and that this is causing unemployment, fine, but otherwise its a narrative I just don’t buy in to.

In both cases, child-labor and automation, someone is assuming that it is inevitable or desirable or unstoppable or necessary. In fact, we choose the society that we construct.

Do we need or want machines to make products for us? Do we want to be passive consumers?

Do we want humans to make products for other humans? Do we want humans to be active and fully involved in the entire cycle of production?

Those are the really important questions.

Phillo

It’s equally a relatively childish intellect which requires these things. Like a pat of the head for a dog. I am not saying that’s all it is, and i can see the benefits all the way to festivities to rejoice and share in one’s accomplishments. I am simply observing what it is and saying that humans can live and be in a different way to that, the alternative lifestyle equally has its benefits and deficits.

Remember that communism is a kind of teamwork, and that stifles the individual/ism.

I find that people who don’t work end up being narcissistic and have feelings of entitlement. They are disconnected from the cycle of life. I’m sure there are exceptions but generally…

It would seem that way but actually in every implementation of communism, there are individuals who pull the strings and destroy the teamwork concept. That is well demonstrated in Animal Farm - if the pigs were team players with the other animals, the system could work in a reasonable way. Unfortunately they are not, and they exploit the other animals to a degree which is worse than the exploitation by the humans.

Let me start with some evidence that this is looming, although I find the intuitive case quite plausible as well and I’ll make that case in response to the rest of your post. I first learned of the idea from Tyler Cowen, who I take to be a reliable source, and who offers a couple datapoints to support the idea that ZMP workers at least temporarily already around:

The rest of the post is worth a read (though I admit that, as an academic economist, Cowen’s posts are strewn with economic specifics that I’m unqualified to comment on). Also see Matt Yglesias’ brief comment to which Cowen is replying, which argues that the workers aren’t ZMP, they just aren’t where the jobs are and can’t get there for one reason or another. That’s a fair response, but for reasons I hope to make clear, I think that, even if that’s currently true, it won’t be true forever.

I also note that Cowen uses “zero marginal product”, and I take that to be the correct economic term, my apologies if that caused any confusion.

I may be reading too much into this statement, so if my response is not controversial please ignore it. But just to be sure we’re on the same page, I’ll offer the point: Rather than identifying industries or types of work that are ZMP, I take the concept to be about individuals with no theoretical value as employees, i.e. there’s nowhere in the economy where they could be stuck to increase the output of the economy.

That’s true, but there’s a limit. Imagine a world where the average computer is smarter than the lowest-intelligence quintile of humans. In that world, there may be some work where those humans can add to net productivity, but it won’t be like it was in the Industrial revolution. A fairly unintelligent human was much more intelligent than the most intelligent machine at that time, so they could contribute raw processing power. But as machines improve their capabilities, that won’t be the case, and the last thing on which humans can almost universally compete is already starting to erode.

I think this goes to your point about “education and training,” which I agree are important policy concerns (and really, we’re several decades behind where we should be in helping people transition into the modern economy). But note that a 10,000 person team won’t necessarily design a better UX than a 10 member team. I’m sure there are thousands of people involved in Facebook’s UI, but there are billions of users. At some point, all such slots where additional human input improves outcome will be occupied, especially as we start to see things like computer-deigned UIs.

This goes for every realm of human creativity: however many humans it takes to build machines that are better workers than every other human, that’s how many employable humans we’ll have. I think it’s intuitively plausible, given the pace of technological development and the state of modern technology (and given that many gains in automation could be made simply by applying current technologies to every field of human labor) - given the current state of tech and its likely future, it’s intuitively plausible that the number of productively employable humans will someday fall below the total world population. At some point, every move that would put a worker into a more productive position will be made, and we’ll be left with people with no way to add to productivity because a machine could be added in their place to better effect and at less cost.

I see desirability as a separate question from inevitability, unstoppability, and necessity. I am arguing for the latter, though I mean inevitability in a non-absolute sense: many catastrophes could wipe out the human population, or set us back technologically, or constrict energy availability drastically, or the like, and in those cases the future I’ve described would be evitable.

But desirability is what we do with that situation. Is the best answer to gin up a solution that puts the brakes on automation, guaranteeing unnecessary toil for future generations in order to avoid people having too much free time?

It’s best to take humans as we find them and design our systems with that constraint, rather than to design a perfect system and lament how good it would be if it weren’t for all these goddamned humans.

Phyllo

I agree they end up like that to a degree. How much of that is due to being ostracised? And because society doesn’t have much to do all day. If we imagine for example the star trek scenario where culture is beyond need and want, and that the technology can create bespoke items as easily as repetitive ones. Much of one’s time would be consumed in non work activities, designing ones homes and products, viewing others art and designs etc. In other words its all about how culture reacts to an inevitable time which is post factory work etc.

This is because we live in a duality, and people will always divide into groups. Communism cannot as it were, undo the fact of individuality.

Either way, that we are being told and virtually forced to be like that, is typical of how the state treats the individual.

In a world beyond manufacturing jobs and much office work, work related responsibility will be a service performed by machines. Ergo the philosophical basis stating ‘you should work’ + ‘it is better for you’ and all that sell sell sell childish capitalist shit [like how they act on the apprentice, be comrades then stab each other in the back duality] will become redundant!

_

Have you heard of “the idle rich”? They are not ostracized - they have nothing to do but consume.

So they say. But in reality, people end up doing nothing but surfing the internet and buying stuff that they don’t use.

The machines will produce products so the sell, sell, sell will still exist and the owners of the machines will have to sell product to pay for the machines and to make a profit.
It’s actually the ultimate perversion of capitalism - one guy makes a ton of profit selling directly to the consumer. It used to be that the owner would make a buck, workers would make a buck, wholesalers would make a buck, retailers would make a buck. In the future, only the owner makes almost all the money. Progress? No. Money flows to fewer and fewer people.

Ignoring the context and misunderstanding all I wrote.

Oh, well.

Although communism claims that all are equal and part of the team , actually …
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”

I’m sorry for my misunderstanding, Phyllo, I misread you to be defending communism as untested.

I agree with this, although I put the blame more on our intellectual property and inheritance policies than on the technology itself. If everyone can build the machines, no one can monopolize the benefits. If no one inherits financial privilege (or at least not as much), then there will more incentive to ensure a good life for those with less.

Phyllo

That is also true, that is to say it is an additional truth. It also shows that there is a way to live which is beyond a work based lifestyle.

Or, people do both. The world isn’t going to stop turning - so to speak.

There will be far fewer buyers in that system. The machines will be able to build machines, factories will be in a single 3D additive kind of technology. Every home will have some devices, though i expect that naturally due to scale, items like cars and homes will be manufactured outside the home. What exactly can be sold that cannot be built for free? A limited amount at best. I don’t see how the current system can cope with the lack of >need<! Now Marx did say ‘each man to his needs’ and this will equally be defunct, made redundant by the changes which will most likely occur in the near future of say 30 years.

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Need is a subjective and malleable standard. With time, people need more things and different things. In order to survive and thrive in a contemporary world one in fact needs more than the basic necessities of human life (food, shelter, etc). What one needs beyond those basic necessities is always changing. Indeed, the current system deals with any lack of need by manufacturing and marketing more need.

But is that malleability infinite? Physical needs are finite, and time is finite. At some point, there aren’t enough hours in the day to need more with which to fill them. Even if someone is filling their every waking moment with consumer goods which they discard before they use them, the sharing economy means that more and more those discarded goods are being purchased second hand or given to someone else, and in either case they are displacing newly produced goods and decreasing net labor demand.

It seems there’s good reason to think that with time (and assuming no catastrophic collapse of human society), people will actually reach maximum need, such that once those needs are met, demand will fall to zero.

Carleas,
this thread seems related to

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=185562&hilit=will+machines+replace

That said: we should also look at rich ZMPs. People who makes Money off the work of their brokers, say. IOW if these ZMPs die, but no one finds the body, absolutely no change in production will take Place. And in general their contribution to production is symbolic. They approve of the work of others who do some investment of their capital.

Then more directly responding to your intentions, I Think: when I was a kid the USSR and the USA were compared to each other by my really rather heavily patriotic social studies teachers along these lines. In the USA the government was for the people, and in the USSR the people were for the government, for the greater good of the whole. In one the government serves the people, in the other the people serve the government. This was presented to us as an easy self-evident, in their Eyes, way of classifying the two forms of government so we would see how horrible they were and how great we had it.

Since my childhood, Corporations have been taking more and more Control of both government and the structure of who is serving what. How things are evaluated. What you are highlighting via the ZMP model is that what once was at least officially a given, that a Citizen had value and structures in society were centered on, in general, making it better for Citizens, has moved towards the USSR model - as described in shorthand by my patriotic teachers. And more and more of us will be superfluous.

It should be made absolutely clear to people that ZMPs will not simply be guys on car assembly lines replaced by robots, but middle management, professionals of all kinds and more also.

ZMP = doctors, nurses, artists, care workers, teachers, museum staff…

What a moronic concept.

It is related. But ZMP will come in before all humans are replaced by robots. And the introduction of automation is only part of what makes workers ZMP. As people move more towards consuming goods whose marginal cost is low (i.e. apps, digital songs, movies, all detached from physical objects), and as internet-based delivery over brick-and-mortar, much more demand can be satisfied by fewer workers. Not just automation but efficiency and cheap reproducibility will put the very low skilled outside of the possibility of adding to marginal product.

We should be careful to distinguish workers who don’t add any marginal product to those who can’t. They’re both social problems, but only the latter are what I mean by ZMP (and of course, there will be substantial overlap between the two sets; the idle rich are unlikely to develop valuable job skills).

But people who could add to marginal product and don’t are a product of inequality, and sometimes they’re just a product of a sense of human dignity (many people over the age of 65 could work, but after 40 year in the workforce we let them enjoy the world they’ve helped build). The problem and the solution are different to those who simply have nothing to offer in terms of their labor.

Not necessarily. The concept of ZMP workers is descriptive, not normative. As a society, we could react to ZMP workers by letting them starve while a fewer and fewer productive workers reap all the benefits of automation. Or, we could start acknowledging that the vast majority of people just don’t need to work 40 hours a week to meet everyone’s needs, stop treating working full time as the measure of human worth, and start thinking about human flourishing in different terms. Either way, we still have ZMP workers, the concept is relevant, we just need to figure out what to do about that.

There seems to be consensus that letting ZMP workers starve is the wrong way to proceed. Phyllo seems to favor make-work. I’d rather a basic income to create a floor and let people choose not to work if that’s what they want. What’s your solution?

The root of the problem is the problem of the carnivore/herbivore/plant relationship. Question, could there be a sustainable ecosystem with only bees and plant lifeforms?

The problem of the herbivore is that they must reproduce quickly to combat causalities of natural devastation such as storms and drought. However, this creates a new problem of overpopulation of herbivores, who eat plants too quickly for the plants to reproduce. The plants begin to die off.

In order to solve this problem, the carnivore must be introduced to kill the excess herbivores. And we are left with a wacky world full of hungry starving carnivores, sex-craved herbivores who are often in fear for their lives. Physics, without a God, gave us the mathematical code for misery.

So we are blessed to eventually evolve intellect from this miserable code, intellect which gives us the ability to play God, because God himself is the ultimate form of intellect, and without intellect, God would not be God. Through intellect we can fiddle around and attempt at salvation.

Possibly, an ecosystem without intellect, such as bees and plants only, would be utopian like, if it could thrive. However, it would be left with the problem of no defense against natural calamities, and would not be stable. So ultimately intellect is the only card which can promote active salvation. Intellect is synonymous with deityhood, or a piece of God, ultimate power. However it is only a piece of the power pie, the other needed elements being empathy, and raw strength to get anything done.

Empathy is defined as an awareness of good and bad, pain and pleasure, as well as lorem ipsum. Empathy extends to others as well as one’s self. So a being without any empathy at, would not attempt to save even itself from danger or suffering. Therefore empathy is a needed piece of the pie in the attempt for salvation of suffering. Greed is a kind of selfish empathy that only extends to one’s self or one’s family. If solipsim is false, it ignores the concept of lorem ipsum, because it promotes suffering of others. So if solipsism is false, that means you are going to experience the lives of all the people you hurt someday. Which means you are causing your future self suffering at some future moment, which violates the principles of lorem ipsum, and is a violation of the path to rid oneself of suffering.

Now these people have been taught again and again what is right and what is wrong. The power structures at play play a game. People are easily brainwashed. People these days are often more angered at the poor receiving handouts, yet don’t make a protest that rich people get more tax money than poor people. In America, middle class are the worker bees, poor people are free-loaders, and the rich are severe scheming parasites. In other countries poor people are total slaves and the other classes are apathetic greedy tyrants.

You have a low probability of teaching sapiens better ways, so the only cure is to boost their intelligence, empathy, a raw power to get things done. And you do this by upgrading their genetics. And you can only upgrade their genetics by a machine right now, because there is no more natural selection occuring. Statistics show that low intelligence sapiens breed more than higher intelligence sapiens. So your only option is to upgrade the DNA using some kind of artifice. If you do not there is a real possibility of the entire human race falling into a perpetual loop of repeating it’'s own history.

In short, if you want to change the world, you have to change people’s minds. Time and time again there have been stories of free-energy machines which have been hidden away by shadow powers and greedy oil interests. Do fat people really need all the resources? Twice as many animals have to die to feed an entitled fat blob. Humans have evolved to be greedy resource hogs. So if you want to change things, you need to change the human organism itself. If you replace all of the factory workers with robots, yet do not change the humans running the infrastructure, you will not improve the quality of life of the workers. But if you give the people in power higher intellect, they will make sound and rational changes to the infrastructure, and replace workers with robots, and give the workers who have been replaced a high quality of life without making them destitute. The End.

50 years ago they were giving mental patients lobotomies. The human race is barely evolved, and yet it is the dominant power unit of the infrastructure. The core unit must be upgraded, a home, a structure cannot be built on styrofoam. Ultron was right, however there is another way besides extinction. Humans can simply upgrade their genetics.

Right, but then robots have come in and replaced humans before all humans are replaced by robots. It is part of current and past ZMP creation.

IN the West I see it more as, someone else somewhere can do it cheaper.

They do not need to.

Only if there is normative intentions present.

I see so many problem intertwined I have no idea where to start. IOW I cannot connect to the thought experiment implicit in viewing from above as if I had enough power to enact change. Or even, what would be a good idea to move towards? Given the current power dynamics in the world, I don’t see either of your solutions coming to pass in general. IN some smaller local areas, possibly.