= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on Why people want to die - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (174)
I think this is cultural much more than it is biological.
The concept of retirement is both mostly cultural and fairly new. People retire, often at an arbitrary pension age cutoff, not so much because they can't work anymore (at the time of retirement), as because they aren't expected to; their age cohort retires together. This is also driven by capitalism: the working classes to work to survive, and working is unpleasant and takes up all their time, but at least they can save up pensions (or the state guarantees a pension at some age) so they aren't literally worked to their deaths.
I think past societies were different. Only a few people lived for many years after becoming physically or mentally decrepit and unable to do productive work; most people declined and died unexpectedly and quickly. The rich and ruling classes grew ever richer and more powerful until their deaths; old kings, generals and businessmen didn't sit around "waiting for death peacefully", they kept doing the same things they had always done, just less vigorously. And the working and farming majority never stopped working while they could help it, since they rarely had enough savings (in money, food, or things of value), and wouldn't use them outside emergencies.
Today automation is pricing humans out of more and more markets. I believe this will eventually cause high unemployment. Suppose a guaranteed income is introduced and unemployment rises to 90%. The newly unemployed people will face the same problem today's retirees have: what to do with their free time? What to live for? If people have to face this question at age 20, they will give a different answer than at age 70 after a lifetime of tiring, boring, non-fun work.
According to a recent study technology produced more jobs than it destroyed: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-created-more-jobs-than-destroyed-140-years-data-census
Here's the link. Its title is "Technology and people: The great job-creating machine" by Ian Stewart, Debapratim De and Alex Cole. This is a report that quotes and compares a few jobs-by-sector statistics from various (UK) censuses.
We don't need the census data to notice that we don't in fact have much higher unemployment (which is something I think will change in the future), and the population has also increased, so clearly new jobs were created. How much of that is attributable to "technology" is debatable and the report doesn't analyze this.
In fact it doesn't do any analysis at all; it consists entirely of a list of examples of particular job sectors that have changed in size over the years, with brief descriptions of what the authors think were the reasons. And most of the reasons they give are not technological, but social or economic. (Also, many of the examples they give are comparing today to 1992, not any earlier periods.)
In summary, I don't think this report provides any evidence that technology has recently created or will continue to create a number of jobs commensurate with the number automated away.