Amazon and the destruction of the world

Amazon Shows the Futility of Minimum Wage Increases

​More below.

I wrote about this just yesterday, but I do so love Walter Russell Mead's take on things.

"This story nicely encapsulates the sheer futility of many policies aimed at protecting workers. Trump may persuade more companies to keep their factories and warehouses in America, but it will be much harder to stop them from replacing human beings who operate those plants with robots. Blue states will keep raising minimum wages, and that might give a boost to some workers in the short-term, but it won’t stop the eventual elimination of many entry-level employment jobs. In Seattle, where Amazon is building its first cashier-less store, raising the minimum wage just $1.53 to $11 has already decreased the share of workers with jobs by 1.2 percent. By the time Seattle hits $15 in 2021, many more job positions will have been priced out. Raising minimum wages accelerates the elimination of low-wage work through automation and raises the barrier to entry for new companies that don’t have advanced capabilities.

Policymakers and pundits can bemoan technological advances all they want, but they can’t stop them. Computers are cheaper than humans, and they’re often faster too. Rather than trying to fight the tide, we should be thinking about how government can help people learn how to swim with it."
  
The real thing to remember about the Amazon shift is that it is happening in the service economy, not the manufacturing/industrial economy. The process of productivity enhancements continues apace, in the agricultural, industrial, service, and in the new economy as well. We should expect it not just to continue but to accelerate as we approach the Singularity. Just as in the past it took one man to manage a few hundred laying hens but today it takes one man to manage about 1,000,000 laying hens, expect similar changes to come to the manufacturing/industrial, service, and new economies. 

What does this mean for jobs? Will there be jobs? No one knows. But this is not the end of the world. Prior to the industrial age there were very few "jobs." Wealth was not redistributed through jobs, or wages, it was redistributed in other ways. There is no reason to believe we will be unable to redistribute wealth in the new economy, whether it is jobs driven, or not. We are sufficiently creative to find responsible, and equitable means of redistributing wealth. 

Some things which are clear are that we will continue to have more leisure time, that education will shift to accommodate our new needs, and we will find productive things to occupy our time, and energy. Call this work, or whatever you wish, but this will happen, it always does. Our children's lives will be better, fuller, and more productive than ours. 

All this said, we still need to live in the present, not the future, and not the past. Only the present exists. The past is gone, the future only a possibility. Relax it will all work out. Even our leviathan federal government cannot stop this change. It can slow it, delay it, obfuscate it, and confuse us as to its desirability, but it cannot stop it. The leviathan Singularity comes for all men. 

I fully expect Amazon to become wealthy selling this technology to retail stores everywhere.

And just think of how this will lower costs, not only from the elimination of one of the largest cost centers, but also from theft/casualty loss. 

The next step is for the store to have only a few items of stock for immediate use, allowing patrons to fill a basket of virtual goods which will be delivered to their home at a time of the patrons choice. The few goods on the shelf will be for immediate use, a soda to drink on the walk home, for example. 

Best yet, such a system could also track what you have in your personal cupboard, and let you know how many of an item or similar items you have on hand. This would require you scan items when used, but this is already being executed in other ways. Amazon already had the Dash reordering system, and there is another similar reordering system which attaches to your garbage. You scan your disposed items and it reorders as necessary. With RFID chips this could be bulk automated, and you would not even need to scan items, like the Amazon grocery store they would self scan in the garbage can. 

Amazon will undoubtedly use this to cross sell you on items you do not buy, but may wish to try.

Between this and the self drive car, we have lots of changes in store.