If there's a global technology race, Europe is going to lose.

This is clear from an interview in Der Speigel with Pedro Domingos, author of 'The Master Algorithm' (which, we're told sits on Xi Jinping's bookshelf alongside Marx and Mao):

My literary agent told me: "You are going to sell this book all over the world, but not in France and Germany." And that's what happened. "The Master Algorithm" was sold to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea. There are Polish and Russian translations. But my agent was right when he said: "The Germans and the French don't like these things."

There still isn't a German translation of the book and it's because the Europeans are terrified of technology's implications:

The picture coming out of Silicon Valley is a very optimistic one, informed by libertarian ideas. The very opposite is true for Europe: I just came back from a conference in Berlin where I was struck by the sheer pessimism. Every other session was about: "Oh, we have to fear this. Who knows what may be going on here?"

This technology - Artificial Intelligence - is our future economy, it is our escape (if Silicon Valley's libertarianism wins over Jinping's autocracy) from being what sociologist C. Wright Mills called The Cheerful Robot back in 1959 (if not it's a world more like Taylorism on steroids - Zamyatin's 'We'). Yet European governments are closing the doors to the idea - from proposals for limits on robots to government access to commercial algorithms the EU and other European governments are set against the idea of a liberal, free market artificial intelligence.

Here in Britain it's not much better with the recent Facebook / Cambridge Analytica sessions, the House of Lords' risible report on AI regulation, the febrile 'we're being spied on by evil capitalists' line of national broadcasters and broadsheets, and a government that can't see how giving the state access to encrypted messaging makes that messaging useless.

We need a debate about the risks and benefits rather than about how we can control the technology - what are the downside risks of unregulated commercial AI set against the upside benefits of giving technology innovators free rein? What, as Domingos comments, is the balance between 'explainability' (this is what the algorithm does) and effectiveness?

Right now Europe, for all its brains and corporate clout, is dragging its heels and, worse, has a government in the EU that is actively opposed to both a liberal US-style technology surge and an autocratic Chinese-style approach. Whoever wins this battle, it isn't going to be Europe.

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Now, about those robots...

From Deirdre McCloskey:

If the nightmare of technological unemployment were true, it would already have happened, repeatedly and massively. In 1800, four out of five Americans worked on farms. Now one in 50 do, but the advent of mechanical harvesting and hybrid corn did not disemploy the other 78 percent.

In 1910, one out of 20 of the American workforce was on the railways. In the late 1940s, 350,000 manual telephone operators worked for AT&T alone. In the 1950s, elevator operators by the hundreds of thousands lost their jobs to passengers pushing buttons. Typists have vanished from offices. But if blacksmiths unemployed by cars or TV repairmen unemployed by printed circuits never got another job, unemployment would not be 5 percent, or 10 percent in a bad year. It would be 50 percent and climbing.

Maybe there is a limit. Maybe. But aren't we better off, regardless of that financial investment warning, planning for tomorrow's changes to result in similar outcomes from today's?



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Owning robots...

Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution responds to this question (with a very interesting consideration of robotised government):

There’s two versions of this.

1. One or a small group of entrepreneurs owns the robots.

2. The government owns the robots.

I see how we get from where we are now to 1. How would we get to 2, and is 2 better than 1?

Leaving aside Cowan's discussion of what government means in a robotised world, isn't there a big issue with the premise of this question? The idea that state ownership of the robots is desirable? And whether 1. accurately describes how those robots will actually be owned?

The first point is that the robots will be an asset either of the business employing them or, assuming some sort of leasing arrangement, of a financial institution. So there may be a 'small group of entrepreneurs' owning the businesses that make the robots but the robots themselves won't be owned by those businesses (except one guesses for the robots that are making the robots that make the robots).

So the question really isn't about who owns the robots in a future economy but rather who owns the businesses that employ the robots to make and do things. This is a very different question. We can, on the basis of historical experience, dismiss the idea that state ownership of the economy is better than other forms of ownership. The Soviet Union tells us this is the case. At the same time, however, we can see that the productivity gains from the robot economy have to arrive in the pockets of regular folk for that robot economy to work.

Partly this distribution of the robot benefits comes through goods and services being cheaper (lots cheaper in some cases) thereby allowing our money to go further. But there is also the consideration that the benefits cannot simply go to a few entrepreneurs if the advantages of robots are to be realised. This is where some advocates of minimum basic income get their shtick - government taxes the robots' added value and shares it with the humans who don't have jobs any more thereby allowing those humans space to go off and do exciting, creative stuff. This does presuppose that government will not crash the robot economy so as to pay the higher basic income they promised in order to get elected. Not a presupposition I'd care to put money on.

Far better would be for us - not the government but us - to own the robots. Or, to put it another way, to own the businesses that employ the robots. And we have the models for this - mutual funds, pensions, investment funds. It would be good if (and Cowan's robot government suggests this might be so) government didn't crowd out investing in business by running huge debts funded by money that might otherwise be invested in the productive economy.

So the robot future could be very different from our presumption. Much smaller (or really much cheaper which isn't quite the same thing) government meaning that money currently taken either in taxes or spent buying government debt is available to invest in businesses that employ the robots. And a whole load of that money will belong to 'we the people' - actually belong rather than belong in some sort of romantic, wistful socialist manner. We get to own the robots.

So it's not how we get from 1. to 2. in the original question but rather how does government help us get to own those robots.

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Proper Jobs for Proper Blokes - thoughts on our robot future.

So we're having a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich as we wait out the hour before we get on the plane. And out the window we can see that typical airside scene with a bizarre collection of oddly shaped vehicles buzzing from hangers to planes, from terminals to hangers and on seemingly purposeless but I'm sure important trips elsewhere on the airport. Each one of those little vehicles is controlled by a man (and yes, as far as we could see, they were all men) and by the hanger doors there were other men. All sporting hi-vis clothing, heavy gloves and sensible boot-like footwear.

I don't know how many such men are employed at Leeds Bradford International Airport but they're pretty important to the smooth running of the enterprise - loading stuff on and off planes, waving things about to make sure everything goes in the right direction, hanging about in case there's a fire. A host of good old fashioned unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled manual labour. Proper jobs for proper blokes.

The thing is that, within a decade nearly all of these jobs will be gone. And, just as with mining, steel and shipbuilding, the big losers in this change will be working class men of a certain age. Too far away from retirement to just sack it all and put the feet up, too old and stuck to easily retrain for an unfamiliar, non-manual role. So just like those miners and steelworkers, we'll grow another cohort of resentful, unhealthy and unhappy men. Not just from the airport but men who once drove taxis, trains and buses, men who dug holes in roads, and men who sailed ships.

The future includes a scene where the product of an autonomous factory is loaded (automatically) onto a driverless truck which travels to an automated port to be transferred to a ship without a pilot which will take that product to another automated port, onto another driverless truck to an unmanned warehouse from where it's delivered to your house by a drone. Partly this is wonderful - a fulfilment of man's search to save labour so we can chill out with a beer. Partly it's terrifying, a dystopian, soul-less future without those 'proper jobs for proper blokes'.

We are doing too little thinking about this future. Not just how we make the undoubted economic gains that come from mechanisation, deskilling and robotics but how we share those gains across society without slaughtering the golden geese of our digital future. Some of this thinking is short term - what do we do for those proper blokes doing proper jobs at the airport, what work will there be for a future generation of less intelligent, less skilled men? Some of it is longer term - do we need a different approach to work, tax and responsibility in a world where most tasks are done by robots?

But in framing these thoughts we need to start by dealing with the things which aren't so - like us being more income poor:

Those of us who currently appear to have job security can more than likely look forward to making less in the future than we had once hoped we might. Over the last couple of decades, wages, adjusted for inflation, have scarcely grown throughout a broad range of rich countries, longer in some cases. And this wage stagnation has occurred alongside other distressing trends. The share of income flowing to workers, as opposed to business and property owners, has fallen. And, among workers, there has been a sharp rise in inequality, with the share of income going to those earning the highest incomes increasing in an astounding fashion.

Bits of this paragraph are sort of true (the wage stagnation part, for example) but most of it is nonsense - at least in an article about robots. What is interesting to explore however is this question about capital ownership versus labour. Put simply, this is where we want things to go - we want more people, in some way, to own more of those value-producing robots rather than get the means for consumption either via wages for labour or a benefits system. If those proper blokes wanting proper jobs did so in the context of having a rent income from a share of those robots this might reduce stresses associated with finding enough money to put food on the table, clothes on the kids and roof over the family.

Of course, one of the things with that food, clothing and roof is it will - so long as government keeps its neb out - be a whole lot cheaper than it is now. As an aside this is one of the reasons why the argument about wage stagnation is a bit one-eyed. What costs us £100 to lay on now may, in our automated future, cost only £20 - so even if wages stagnate, we'll all be a whole lot richer for the automation. The problem is that the route to realising those changes lies in removing the most expensive part of the service economy - people. The brake on automation isn't technological but economic - we only keep investing so long as there's a return and if automation destroys the mass market there won't be any automation.

The answer might lie in some sort of redistributive system such as 'universal basic income' but, depending on how it's set, this can only result in a class of de facto drones. A bigger problem is that such an approach doesn't connect income to ownership but rather links it to taxation. In a democracy this risks people voting to take more and more of other people's money. It would be far better to give workers ownership rather than just cash - in trite terms to give everyone a robot rather than a cheque from the government.

Perhaps the answer comes from a hybrid of these two thing. Until recently the UK's private pension system was held up as a fine example of how these things should work and it invested in industry meaning that nearly all British workers had, in one way or another, a stake in the nation. I appreciate that this might be something of a starry-eyed view of the past but it provides a hint of a possible way through the robot problem. After all those robots are capital and that capital has to come from somewhere - why not a fund or funds created by government expressly for the purpose of such investments, for buying robots. With the beneficiaries of the funds' earnings being the UK public and those payments distributed on a 'universal income' basis? Of course, as a good voluntarist, these funds should have what we might call a 'private socialist' structure such as a mutual or co-op and, as such, would be free from the tendency of governments to waste money on infrastructural vanities.

I've just put this here as a thought - I've no idea whether it would be practical (whose making the robots any how - there's no obvious Sirius Cybernetics Corporation) but it gets out from the pretty sterile 'late capitalism' arguments that dominate discussion of our futures. What I do fear isn't the capacity of our systems, ingenuity and innovation to meet (and make better) our future needs but rather a sort of neo-luddism that leads to the fetishing of inefficiency - we see this with organic and biodynamic farming, for example - and the impoverishment that comes from protectionism.

The future, for all its robots, will continue to require people to provide labour but, just as has happened before, the nature of that labour will change. There's a game played by some of trying to guess what jobs there'll be in the future that we haven't thought of yet - it's not just the 'app economy' or the chance to rent out your spare bedroom to visitors but a whole load of other things too. I suspect that we'll still value human service and that, in its widest form, entertainment will be important. And I'm convinced that some of those things we dismiss as 'micky mouse', especially culture things, will become far more valued as skills than the scientific and technical skills we stress today.

In the meantime we've got to work out how we reassure those proper blokes doing proper jobs at the airport that their life isn't going to be crap once the robots take their jobs away. We need to try and avoid the mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s when we assumed the changing economy would provide for those blokes. It might but, it has more chance of doing so if we start thinking about it before they've been given their P45s.

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Some stuff worth reading...on open borders, Bowie, vegans and High Street robots (plus other goodies too!)

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The Islamophobic Case for Open Borders

"In America, 77% of those raised Muslim, are still Muslim, according to Pew. That’s a fairly high retention rate, but Islam in the West still loses about one-fourth of each Muslim-born generation. At that rate of member loss, less than half of the descendants of Muslims would still be Muslim after three generations. Germany’s assimilation of Turkish migrants seems to illustrate how this process plays out. Less than 2% of the German population self-identifies as Muslim. Almost twice as many people in Germany are of Turkish descent, and there are also substantial numbers of Arabs. Since Turkey’s population is almost exclusively Muslim, it seems that Islam must have lost roughly half of the natural increase of its emigrants in Germany to apostasy."

Bowie was an entrepreneur before he was an artist or performer

"I wanted to be thought of as someone who was very much a trendy person, rather than a trend. I didn’t want to be a trend, I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new ideas and new perspectives. And so I had to govern everything around that. So I pulled myself in, and decided to use the easiest medium to start off with -- which was rock and roll -- and to add bits and pieces to it over the years, so that by the end of it, I was my own medium."

Why councils are shutting down 'stop smoking' services

'Councils remain committed to helping smokers quit, however they face significant cuts to public health budgets this year, and spending large volumes of money on a service people are not using will fast undermine the cost-effectiveness of providing it.'

The powerful state damages society - always

"Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power."

People promoting meat don't like vegans much

"A provocative advertisement encouraging Australians to eat lamb has been criticised for discriminating against vegans and portraying excessive violence.

The advertisement, which has gone viral on social media and been viewed more than 250,000 times on YouTube, depicts a military campaign to bring Australians home from overseas so that they can eat lamb on Australia Day.

In a controversial scene that has reportedly sparked more than 60 complaints to the advertising watchdog, a team of special agents break into an Australian man’s apartment in New York and ignite a blowtorch after he reveals he has become a vegan."

You can watch the ad here.

Donald Trump and Bernie Saunders are mining the same seam of dissatisfaction

"While the white working class is shrinking in the US, it remains the largest voting block in the country. That may be why leaders of both parties are concerned that white working-class voters, especially in the Midwest and South, are supporting populist candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They don’t understand that many of these voters blame Wall Street, corporate leaders, and politicians – the East Coast establishment –for destroying their jobs and communities over the past few decades."

Robots will save the High Street

"Through all these varying examples, we see an automation of retail that develops itself in full speed. Whether it are new types of vending machines that help increase consumptive convenience, offering fresh and healthy products 24/7, or technology that changes our traditional ideas of ordering and preparing food in restaurant — it’s clear that retail landscapes and practices of consumption are strongly influenced by a sense of automation."

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Robots and the successors to Captain Swing....

Sir, Your name is down amongst the Black hearts in the Black Book and this is to advise you and the like of you, who are Parson Justasses, to make your wills. Ye have been the Blackguard Enemies of the People on all occasions, Ye have not yet done as ye ought,.... Swing

We are told - by people far wiser and more knowing than me - that the future of employment is bleak:

Could the jobless recovery be signalling that technology has lead to the sort of abundance and productivity that leaves NAIRU — the unemployment rate below which inflation rises — with no choice but to recalibrate higher, if returns on capital investment are to be protected?

The point being made here is that the future of making stuff rests with robots not with people. And that means there won't be enough work for all the people. The result of this is a lot of frothing and excitement and calls for something to be done. And is accompanied by the emergence - blinking in the lights of the 21st Century - of Captain Swing from his nearly 200 year rest.

For men who smashed up the threshing machines under Swing's directions, just as for the followers of Ned Ludd, the objective was to constrain technology. By preventing its spread or by limiting its application (or as in the print industry by requiring more overlookers and operators than the machine required) we protect jobs and the livelihoods of workers.

The simple truth of technology is that, while technology improves productivity, causes prices to fall, demand to rise, more workers to be hired, and the economy to grow, there is a practical limit. If all the work is done by robots all the productivity gain serves no purpose since there is no work and no earnings - no-one to buy the things the robots make.

The central issue here isn't whether we have a job but rather whether we need to have a job. In simple terms, the people who own the robots don't need a job because the rents generated from that ownership would provide. The problem - if the argument about technology destroying all the jobs is correct - is with the people who don't own the robots (or at least not the robots that make all the stuff).

The modern day successors of Captain Swing think they've a great solution - let's either pay everyone a basic income with no strings or else fund a guarantee of a job. We have to assume that the money for this system (whichever is chosen) would come from taxing the robots - or rather the returns the robots generate for the people who own them.

The questions we have to ask are firstly, will there really be a wholesale destruction of jobs without new ones to replace them? And secondly would a basic income or job guarantee actually work? There is a third question - is it morally justified to pay people to do nothing - but this is a far bigger question and we'll leave it for now.

Apple reckoned recently that the app economy (just the iOS bit) has generated nearly 300,000 jobs in the USA alone:

The app revolution has added more than 291,250 iOS jobs to the U.S. economy since the introduction of iPhone in 2007

These are jobs that we hadn't thought of - for all the jobs destroyed by technology there are new ones created.  Izabella Kaminska may talk about the 'jobless recovery' but there's precious little evidence for it - other than in the sclerotic, over-regulated economies of Europe. It could be argued as forcefully that supply-side barriers to employment, the lack of need to work (especially among young people receiving benefits and contributions from the bank of mum and dad) and poor education are more of a problem than the rise of the robots. That government is more of a barrier to future job creation than robots.

A further factor in all this will be that - as has happened over the past decades - we'll see a further decline in average working hours. Back in Captain Swing's day the workers toiled for six days - probably for ten, even twelve hours, for wages far less than any basic income we might propose. And despite this the Captain and his mates smashed up the machines so the workers could carry on with back-breaking, life-shortening heavy manual labour.

Today, the average working day is under eight hours and people work just five days - our time working nears half that of those Captain Swing and Ned Ludd protected. And yet our incomes are immeasurably higher - even the wealthy owners of those threshing machines would be amazed at the life, the comforts that the poorest Englishman enjoys today. What is to suppose that this trend continues? That we work only 25 hours before enjoying the benefits of that work (and let's face it most people work because they want the money not because their work is such an exciting thing to do)?

It seems to me that the bounty of the robots' efforts will be more leisure time for all. And not some ridiculous idea that allowing anyone - at any time - to down tools and toddle off to live on their basic income. Get a good summer and no-one would be working (I appreciate that many of the believers in basic income also follow MMT - "magic money tree" - fantasies and the delusion that this doesn't matter). This indeed is rather the point of it all - we know that, given half a chance, people will swing the lead (you only need to look at sickness statistics in local government to understand this), so if we legitimise swinging the lead we'll just take advantage. As Flanders & Swann noted: "you can't change human nature."

This argument - 'there'll be no jobs, you know" - rather reminds me of Paul Ehrlich's bet on resource depletion. Following one thread takes you to a point where logic and common senses collapse. The theory still looks shiny and right but it has lost any contact with reality. Which, I guess explains why seemingly intelligent people are sucked into believing the sort of nonsense that is basic income (or worse job guarantees that are essentially slave labour directed by the state - we feed and clothe you and you do whatever work we demand).

If there is more stuff (in the widest sense of the word stuff) for us that is good especially if that more stuff comes without us having to work more hours. And that increased earning means more time for arts, sport, celebration, fun and games (and for all the people that provide such pleasure).

So let's be optimistic about what the robots bring and let's escape from the controlling, dictating approach that is captured by one advocate of basic income:

And I don't think anyone from the basic income side would dispute that the public sector might need to help those who are not self-starters to find useful and productive things to do.

And this from someone who self-describes as a "liberal" - such a view is as far removed from liberal as it is possible to get. Look folks, the future's a great place - there'll be flying cars, jet packs, holographic opera and leisure trips into space. And, even better, nearly everyone will be able to afford this stuff. So let's get on with the free markets that make it work and give up on the idea that the solution lies in either a vast lump of unmotivated drones paid to do nothing or else a slave labour force for the masters to direct to projects of their choice.

Above all let's remember - always remember - that government, mostly and most of the time, is the problem not the solution. And let's enjoy the future - it will be better than the past.

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Robots are great and we need more of them to make stuff for us...

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I get ever more irritated by the bonkers notion that technological advance and improvement is a bad thing for the economy. You see it churned out all over, mostly (but not always) by the good thinking Guardian left. These folk just don't get it:

It's about technology taking jobs, about what it can and can't provide. Hoskyns quotes Jaron Lanier's new book Who Owns The Future?, in which he argues: "Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers." Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.

This is just plain daft. Free is good. We like free - not only is it a magic word but, more to the point, it's an improvement on 'costs so much only people such as Guardian journalists can afford it'. Now in one respect, Lanier is right but his emphasis is still on production rather than consumption. We aren't here to produce stuff, we're here to consume stuff - even if we love our fabulous creative industries job, that's consumption (we're eating up the pleasure).

So yes robots and digital wizardry will "destroy jobs" (this translates as 'makes things a whole lot cheaper because you don't have to pay wages') but all the while new playthings are being invented - think how many people are scraping an adequate living from creating stuff to make use of that digital wizardry, for example. And, so long as the idiot protectionist lefties don't get to control things, stuff gets cheaper so we don't have to work as hard as we do now to get the good stuff. Brilliant!

So no, it's simply not the case and never has been the case, that technical innovation is bad for the economy. Protectionism, subsidised overmanning and the refusal to embrace technology - that was what caused China's 500 year stagnation. And if we adopt the same approach, we will stagnate, there really won't be the jobs we need and future Suzanne Moore types really will be scraping by in some rat-plagued garret.

So let's grab that technology, let's get it working for us, let's shove aside the barriers - unions, business oligopolies, MPs and silly Guardian writers - and get the robots working. We'll all be richer, less frazzled by work and more able to have a bloody great time with the few years we get living on this wonderful planet.

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