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Comment by dcgudeman | Hacker News Reader

"For him, a better future is one where a team of eight guys makes billions of dollars with an invention that replaces thousands of people currently earning livable wages with automation. If those people lose their jobs, they’re just collateral that got in the way of progress. This is a bizarre way of saying that the only thing keeping people poor is their inability to capitalize on their future obsolescence."

This is a completely luddite position.

So if she had it her way we would still have people walking around planting seeds instead of using modern farming equipment because the people planting seeds would have lost their jobs, even though history has shown us time and time again that people retrain and do different work. Not to mention that the new jobs that replaced the old ones are nearly always safer and more productive for society. -------- edited grammar

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This reminds me of the Milton Friedman story where he was visiting a work site in some Asian country where they were building a canal. He was shocked that they were using shovels instead of modern equipment. They told him it was a jobs program, whereupon he responded that they should use spoons instead. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/

Agreed. Replacing menial work with automation frees up the people doing the menial work to learn new skills and do other work. The net result is that more useful work is done, which equates to wealth created. If some of those people are incapable of learning new skills, the net surplus of wealth that we have created should be sufficient for society to cover their basic living expenses. We do not need those people to continue doing busywork in order to provide for them.

The more that we can do this, the more surplus wealth we create. This is clearly working by reference to history: this is the best time ever to be poor, compared to all points in history before it.

This isn't quite so obviously true, but it's likely also the case that an unemployed person today has significantly better life outcomes than a menial worker 100 years ago (which means mines or factories). That's what improved automation buys us.

> If some of those people are incapable of learning new skills, the net surplus of wealth that we have created should be sufficient for society to cover their basic living expenses.

The problem is that roughly half the population is fighting against this kind of social welfare system and they would only be encouraged by PG's blog post.

Replacing menial work with automation frees up the people doing the menial work to learn new skills and do other work

Or, importantly, to do menial work on things that were previously considered not as important or productive as what they were doing menial work on.

People always assume retraining means you have to learn a technological job or something else absurdly out of reach. A lot of the time it just means doing the same or similar thing you were doing, but in another context that has now become relatively valuable enough to devote labor to now that this other thing don't require it.

And, as you hint, being able to create a lot of value without a lot of ongoing cost is a pretty key step towards basic income (of which the "leisure economy" is really just a more extreme example). Having that would indeed offset the issues of those who can't or won't transfer skills.

This makes perfect sense, if you think of a society "spending" people rather than "employing" them. If you can quit spending people on trivial jobs, you've got more people to spend on worthwhile jobs. They work they do will make society better off as a whole. But to get there, we have to free them from the jobs where they would contribute much less - where they would be wasted.

There is truth to it though. Automation can contribute to unemployment and economic inequality. There is absolutely no law of economics that says wages can't decline, or the distribution of wealth can't change.

More automation isn't always better, full stop. I'm not saying that I want people to plant seeds by hand still, but I'm not sure that a completely automated factory farm where no people work is something to strive for either.

I'd like animals to be raised by people, not machines, I think.

No one laments the lack of cow milking jobs, a world where humans don't have to work and instead can pursue creative goals is ideal, I want to see a world where food is just replicated from raw energy.

what if in such a world all production is owned by a tiny (say 100/1000) hypercapitalistic elite, and everything else is automated. Those people would wield more economic and thus political power than anyone else in history.

Humans would not have to work, but its a huge mistake to assume the elite will willingly share that prosperity.

You don't.

I grew up in a town where the dairy farms employed lots of people, as did the businesses that supported them. Most of those farms are gone or scaled back as dairy became an industrialized operation.

The guys who would be working as farm hands year round are now left with seasonal construction jobs and long winters of unemployment in nasty trailer parks. They lose their professional options and their dignity.

I think that we're wired to have a purpose, and not everyone identifies creative pursuits as fulfilling.

You say no one ... Actually, I see a lot of you all saying this about farming .... Do you all live under rocks? You realize there are whole bustling industries of people wanting to go back to eating food produced in the exact opposite way than this frothy breathless Sci-Fi viewpoint.

I mean, I wonder if those who hold such views actually realize human beings aren't actually robots or aren't actually the "extras" in the Sci-Fi stories ...

More automation is almost always better - because once you automate something, you can use technological improvement to increase the efficiency, which reduces the total cost of what you just automated, which results in more of whatever was just automated being available at a lower cost. Net gain to humanity.

I've never worked on a farm, but I have to believe that 99% of the work is something that most farm workers would probably be more than happy to see automated, such that they could manage the machines, rather than the actual mechanical effort. Move up the food chain, if you will.

Also, from the videos I've seen from PETA, it's pretty clear that humans can act pretty horribly around farm animals, so it's not clear to me that the animals are coming off any better either.

Long term, though - I say automate the creation of food such that animals are not involved. All of the things we love, meat, eggs, etc.. should be technologically generated so that no animal is harmed in it's creation.

Get over the uncanny valley, and even things that would appear to be sacrosanct, such as a waiter/waitress at a restaurant, admitting nurse/doctor in an ER Ward, or teacher in a kindergarden - all of these seem to be things that automation would be a net-win.

Where is this efficiency and net gain of which you speak? Real estate, food, energy, health care, education, and other necessities are getting more expensive, often dramatically so and sometimes at rates far beyond inflation.

If this is an age of rapidly improving efficiency then most things should be getting cheaper. The amount of free time and disposable income we have should be increasing. We should be getting wealthier. Instead the opposite is happening for almost everyone save a tiny class of professionals and capitalists. One could be forgiven for thinking we're living in an age of inefficiency and technological decline, since that's what the price signals are indicating.

I'm not sure this is SV or PG's "fault," but PG's rant is smug and non-productive and amounts to a whole lot of "why do they not eat cake?" It makes him sound clueless and out of touch.

What about the fact that tons of people can afford super nice things today by the standards of even 20 years ago? Imagine going back in time 20 years and showing somebody the iphone 4. Or going back 100 years and showing them the beat up junkers people drive in India. Both of those would be miracles, and yet today are very affordable.

Super nice, yes, but not essential. Everything essential is more expensive, often by quite a margin. Housing is insane.

You have to be very specific about housing.

Some is very cheap http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/Detroit,MI/10000p_price/price...

And some is very expensive http://homesoftherich.net/2013/05/30000-square-foot-tudor-ma...

If price is the factor, deals can be found.

All of the things that you are describing, housing, food, energy, health care and education are significantly less expensive in terms of "hours worked to afford X" continue to drop in price, in some cases dramatically, than they were 50 years ago.

What throws things off, is that new, more desirable, and more expensive items have appeared, that make things look more expensive. That's one of the concerns regarding inequality; is it okay for some members of society to have nicer things than the lower percentile income earners, as long as that group of lower percentile incomer earners have nicer things than they did 50 years ago? Or should we desire that everyone have (roughly) the same quality of thing, even if it now means that the lower percentile would be worse off objectively if inequality wasn't reduced?

PG just assumes that the goal is to reduce poverty (as in, amount of food, health care, education) for the lower percentile - but I expect there is a not insignificant group of people who are more interested in reducing inequality, even if that means an (objective) increase in poverty.

There is, of course, a third path that he doesn't even mention - and that's reducing inequality by bringing up the lower percentile. As an American, I sometimes wonder if it doesn't even occur to him (he certainly didn't discuss it in any detail in his essay) that you can develop universal health care, education, etc... that provides the same level of service regardless of wealth - which means if the top percentile want (for example) better health care, they end up increasing the level of service for everyone, including themselves.

The essay on inequality seemed to have blinders on with regards to that possibility, though I think he gave it passing mention in a sentence regarding bring the bottom up, but didn't discuss it in any great detail.

Just to play devil's advocate, the problem here is that you simply haven't taken your notion automation far enough.

I don't want cows to be domesticated en masse at all. I want there to be a factory full of sterile stainless steel tubes in the shape of a t-bone where steak cells endlessly reproduce in a bath of ideal nutrient soup...

To play normal human advocate, nobody that has not gone into a Sci-Fi reading induced coma wants that.

Yeah, that paragraph was where she completely lost me. The desire to ensure the poor are taken care of and given opportunities for advancement is not mutually incompatible with the automation of rote tasks. It is not incumbent on society to stop technological advancement in certain areas to ensure that no additional humans lose their jobs to automated processes.

Getting upset at the loss of jobs is the luddite position. The more socially liberal position is getting upset that the savings from the loss of said jobs are rolled up into the pockets of corporate executives and working to ensure that wealth is equitably distributed. The socially conservative position is that the additional wealth freed up by the automation will create new job opportunities elsewhere that the recently unemployed individual can seek out and pursue. I lean more to the socially liberal side (and hopefully this bias did not creep out in my description of the conservative point of view), but either one is preferable to putting the kibosh on progress because it might step on someone's toes.

s/he/she/, the article was written by Holly Wood

The technology kills jobs argument is so fucking stupid it's unbelievable, in 1700 we had 600 million people. Fast forward to 2015, we have 7 billion people the vast majority who are employed.

If technology killed jobs we'd have like 100 million people working instead of 6 billion workers.

That's assuming that the vast majority of employment can be automated away at a low cost at this point in time. Which isn't true. Even if it can be in the US or other developed countries, that in no way applies to everywhere.

On a long enough timeline, technology will absolutely kill all jobs. That's ideal. Once we have fusion and replicators, why would anyone want a job?

The question is, can our society survive the awkward transition period to post-scarcity, or will we crumble in civil wars and uprisings before we reach the goal of 100% unemployment?

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