Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaosjester | Hacker News Reader

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two MIT economists, recently wrote a book about this, called The Second Machine Age (here: http://www.amzn.to/0393239357). We're teetering on the edge of economic shifts, and we have a lot of questions we're going to need to ask about how people will live in a world where jobs simply aren't available.

When 60% of the workforce is unemployable, either there will be massive unemployment, and the crime, poverty, and starvation associated, or there will be a massive paradigm shift in how we think about employment, money, and scarcity.

I'm hoping we get to the latter before the former.

View on HN

Or each person (moral, physical or AI person) will be able to have that much more leverage in their entrepreneurship.

The industrial revolution eliminated 60% of the jobs and gave birth to communism/socialism/a reaction to the wear of workers by a powerful people.

Subsequent revolutions also gave much more leverage to the "guy in his garage in the Silicon Valley". My wishful thinking hopes that AI will enable us to take up much bigger projects, each of us. Writing a symphony when you're alone? Creating a band, 2 albums, with all the matching marketingware and tv ads, in just 2 weeks? Developing a custom processor as a startup of 3ppl? Creating a new model of car every week? My gut says we'll invent enough fashions and arts to keep us busy.

But there sure will be a lot of poverty and reactive movements. A bloodshed, at least as much as today.

> A bloodshed, at least as much as today.

Bloodshed has been steadily going down for the past hundred years. Besides, Facebook's precognitive security system will anticipate and humanely neutralize dissent before blood is shed. ;)

You know what's great about this? Indications I've gotten from places that look at the data for conflict resolution, etc etc... ...humanely neutralize dissent probably isn't a euphemism for something dystopian; it's probably "send this person/AI to go talk to these people, find out what's up".

"Bloodshed has been steadily going down for the past hundred years"

Bloodshed is going down! This is just a blip! Heil Hitler!

> The industrial revolution eliminated 60% of the jobs and gave birth to communism/socialism/a reaction to the wear of workers by a powerful people. ... Subsequent revolutions also gave much more leverage to the "guy in his garage in the Silicon Valley".

They are not analogous. People are expensive, inefficient and unreliable when compared to machines (where they can even be compared). Each new "revolution" will try to get rid of as many workers as it can. There won't be new jobs for the people that have little or no education. Hell, there may not even be new jobs for people with education. Silicon Valley is the perfect example how this process will go down: new riches for a few people concentrated in very rich metropolises. Where is Namibia's Spotify? In Sweden. There's nothing wrong with this btw, old age technologists used to envision a time where technology freed human beings from the shackles of work but capitalism is in conflict with this idea. The stewards of capitalism need the "losers" and the result will be a lot of misery until we figure out how to accommodate all the unemployed.

50 years ago, society operated just fine with (to a first approximation) 50% of society not working. What happened was we had created an political structure and economy where the metric of "employment" became something to be optimized and effectively achieved an economic system driven to optimize that one number (mostly by screwing the poor) [0].

1) obsessing about employment numbers is exactly the problem.

2) it will be catastrophic unless we change our economic system.

[0] I'm talking about the weird "dual mandate" of the central banks - "maintain employment numbers" and "keep inflation in check": Mostly they have chosen to attack the first with policies encouraging positive inflation, occasionally ignoring the second altogether. A great way to keep employment up is to require people to get jobs in order to stay on a compounding treadmill of currency devaluation. So we see a lot more people entering the workforce too, with collateral damage that families now have to have two working parents, single parents can barely support their children, people go into massive debt to get past the first jobs gatekeeper (college) etc.

> 50 years ago, society operated just fine with (to a first approximation) 50% of society not working.

Are you referring to the fewer women in the workforce 50 years ago? If so, with the increase of women in the workforce during and after WWII, I think "50% of society not working" sounds like a rough overestimation.

sorry, maybe 50 years is a bit too low, but yes that is the general gist.

Inflation has arguably been low since ~1983.

(low interest rates have been a policy after recessions but haven't really lead to long periods of inflation like occurred in the 1970s)

"the greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function" - Albert Bartlett

Huh? I have a fair grasp of the cumulative effect since then (I've been alive the whole time!), I'm not saying it is low out of thin air, that period saw lower inflation than most of the 20th century. Maybe the difference is that I think invested assets largely follow inflation (even bank accounts), so that the primary effect it has is to make relative pricing more fair over time?

That's fine if you think it shouldn't be allowed to exist, but quoting quips is a dreary way to argue it.

your grasp of the situation created by inflation comes of a position of relative privilege; that you "invested assets" at all means that you don't truly understand the plight of the people who are most hurt by it.

You neglected to mention that the people without jobs were totally dependent and almost enslaved to the people that did have jobs. This happened despite (in theory and -mostly- in pracice) legal equality between the sexes (in the west).

Economic power translates into real power quickly. What's to stop that from happening this time around ?

Nothing.

That economic power translates in real power differences didn't just manifest itself between men and women, but between far more groups in society as well.

"When 60% of the workforce is unemployable ..." this is why I think that what we are currently seeing in the Trump phenomenon is just the tip of the iceberg of this problem from the perspective of the US political system. I don't know what can reasonably be done to fix this, but I that I think will get worse before it gets better.

Economics is just a thin veneer over evolution. If the machines can beat us economically, what makes us think they won't beat us at evolution too?

That doesn't necessarily mean humans will go extinct, but there might only be a handful of us left in zoos, bred for whatever characteristics pleases the machines most.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com