The brave new world of robots and lost jobs | Hacker News Reader

The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

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107 pointsaburan28233 comments

Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency.

Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on welfare instead, and the economy as a whole is burning almost 2x more resources. Sure, the employer is spending slightly less, while screwing over the economy via prisoner's dilemma logic.

[1] http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20160704.html

You've got the 1st order effects completely right, but there would be several second-order effects that would undermine this result.

(1) There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output.

(2) The reduction in marginal costs would increase supply of the good and reduce its price.

(3) The increased profits earned by the firm/robot inventor would increase demand or saving/consumption of other goods.

(4) The change in relative wages would encourage workers to retrain and switch industries.

In 1850, 60%+ of the American labour force were farmers and over the next 100 years their jobs were automated out of existence by range of more efficient 'robots'. This was no-doubt harmful for many specific farm labourers, but didn't 'screw over the economy'.

I don't think the existence of jobs you could quickly retrain to is an eternal law of nature :-(

No, but at the moment there are many such jobs. Maid, cook, child care, a significant amount of construction labor, etc.

I blogged about this a while back. Until robots do all the jobs that are actually done in India (e.g. robot cooks, robot maids, robot cigarette walas), there still exist jobs people can do. Americans just refuse to do them, since it's easier to not work.

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...

That may happen one day, but at the moment we have a scarcity of labor rather than a surplus.

Those jobs are impossible without a very high inequality. In the first world, there is a much smaller gap between the average wage and the minimum allowed wage than in India, making impossible many jobs that are time intensive with low revenue.

An engineer can have a cook and a driver if they make ten times as much as a cook or a driver; this arrangement doesn't really work if a typical engineer makes e.g. two or three times as much.

Yes, there would be a larger total demand for labor if we allowed the price to drop below that. But we don't. As we cut off the market to allow only transactions above the "livable wage" price floor, then at that price level we have a surplus of labor supply and a lack of demand.

India has lower income inequality than the US. Your hypothesis seems falsified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

This measure of inequality is mostly influenced by the distance between the mean income and the largest earners (who constitute a huge portion of the total GDP), however, I still maintain that in India there is a much larger distance between the mean income and the lowest wages of simple laborers/maids/walas/etc than the first world.

It seems that you are from India, can you give an anecdotal example of how large is difference between the income of "typical" experienced white collar specialist and the income of cheapest maids, cooks or cigarette walas, the bottom part of the labor pool?

E.g. in the UK the median hourly wage is roughly twice as much as the minimum; the very very lowest possible paying job pays half that of a "normal" average job; and statistics show that the median salary of a software engineer, considered a lucrative career, is 6 times that of the minimum.

Obviously the average person can't buy much of services (no matter how unskilled and lowpaid) of others, since buying 40 hours/week of anyone costs at least half of their total income; and a software engineer could have a full-time (again, 40hr/week not the whole week) cook/maid/driver/whatever only if he paid him at least 1/6th of his total income.

I'm not from India but I spend a lot of time there. Most people don't have a full time maid. They have a maid who comes daily (or maybe 3x/week) and also works for others.

This is quite feasible economically in the US - suppose cleaning a home takes 2 hours and a maid accepts $10/hour. That's $20/day or $430/month (assuming 5x/week). So in the US you could get comparable levels of service for maybe $1000/month. It's just not feasible right now because maids cost a lot more than $10/hour.

A maid working 10 hours/day, 5 days/week would be earning $2150/month. For comparison, US GDP/capita works out to $4,400/month. (Mean wage/compensation is a bit lower than this.)

But you don't even need to look at money to determine this is feasible. You just need to count. Take the number of people sitting around on welfare/disability fraud/etc, multiply by the number of houses they could clean each day, and you can determine how many maids the US could have.

The thing is, there really isn't a market for a huge number of maids when it costs $1000/month, and you can't really go below that because, as you say, $10/hour.. about the minimum wage in many places.

The middle class in USA definitelly can't afford to pay $12k/year (plus taxes!) for such a service. The most highly paid white collar professions would generally scoff at such an expense. At best, the top 1% could afford that, but they don't employ that much maids because there's not so many so rich people.

The middle class in the USA is already paying for such a service! When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work.

All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something.

I know this is an old thread that I'm unlikely to get a response to, but I can't tell whether you're proposing a federal make-work program or a free-market restructuring. If the latter, you seem to be ignoring the demand side of the equation, which makes your whole proposal unworkable - there isn't demand for this in the US, and not just for financial reasons, the middle class here is unlikely to employ (what we see as) servants for social reasons as well. If you're proposing a make-work program where tax dollars go toward putting people to work, maybe that's a good idea, but I'd rather see those people working on improving our crumbling infrastructure, or perhaps on creating new high-speed rail, than cleaning middle class houses.

> When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work.

Okay, there's a sense in which that's true, but...

> All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something.

The problem with that (aside from any other problems with the whole "basic job" idea) is that the only sense in which it the preceding claim is true is if you count medical and contribution-qualified programs for the aged and disabled (which are the bulk of payments "to people who don't work".)

I mean, this characterization is ludicrous unless your plan is to drag people out of nursing homes to serve in your Basic Job Army.

Are you seriously claiming that the only non-working government dependents are the elderly and disabled?

I've linked to this expose by NPR on disability fraud before: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

> Are you seriously claiming that the only non-working government dependents are the elderly and disabled?

I'm saying that the overwhelming majority of government spending on the non-working is benefits to the aged and disabled.

SS and Medicare alone are the majority of such spending, and go exclusively to that group, and overwhelming to the aged specifically; the next big chunk is Medicaid (at least, the portion that goes to people that aren't working, some Medicaid beneficiaries are low-income but employed) which, while income qualified, has a very significant fraction of its expenses go to Medicaid/Medicare dual eligibles.

And, so, to the extent that your pointing to the share of government spending that goes to the non-working is intended as something other than a red herring, it only makes sense if you plan on dragging the aged and disabled into your forced labor army as a condition of their continued survival.

Its possible only because human labor is cheap. And that is because those people have nothing else to do. Population is high, resources are scanty. People will do whatever they can to make a living.

But in most urban metros, cost of human labor is only going up. Washing machines are all over the places, dryers which were absent even a few years back are showing up. Robot vacuum cleaners are replacing few-hours/day maids all the time.

This is even more so in high rising apartments. Maid culture and personal servant culture in India is ending with urban living.

You can't just look at the supply side. It's hard to imagine there's very much demand for $500-$1000/month maid services, especially in areas where all these people on welfare live.

Also, do you know anyone on welfare in the US? Do they really seem like they're "sitting around" to you?

As an Indian. Let me tell you the kind of inequality you see in the US is very different compared to the kind of inequality you see in India. By many a definition, no one is poor in the US. Also US has better infrastructure and economic opportunities than India for everyone. By infrastructure I mean access to clean drinking water, sanitation and things like roads.

US has more a problem of strict tax accountability for upper-middle-to-lower classes, while none for the rich. And lack of chances to breaking income ceilings. Swim lanes in US are decided in the first 20-25 years of life and things are pretty much set from there on.

While in India we still have people eating rotis(Indian flat bread) made out wild grass with salt once/twice a day merely to stay alive.

> there still exist jobs [like maid, cook, child care] people can do. Americans just refuse to do them

In many cases Americans refuse to hire them, for cultural reasons that may be the flip side of Americans refusing to do them. Child care is one that there seems to be a lot of (at least, one hears about it a lot), but maid, cook, butler, and even general handyman are positions that many Americans won't consider hiring someone for, in any stable, ongoing way.

I have no problem hiring an electrician to come in and rewire parts of my (1950s era) house, because the maximum I'm willing to pay is above the minimum I would need to pay to avoid feeling like I was cheating them. For full-time cook or maid or general laborer, the willing-max is below the fair-min.

This is an interesting hypothesis - a culturally imposed minimum wage. I'm a bit suspicious because I don't see much evidence of a floor. For example, people seem quite willing to hire Mexicans outside home depo for relatively low wages.

The common solution to sticky nominal wages is economic stimulus; inflate away real wages to trick people into hiring at lower real wages. Do you think that would fix this issue?

Anyone can cook. Will people pay me a living wage to cook? Will that wage cover lost income from being on government programs? Does cooking (given the relative difficulty of becoming wealthy doing so) provide an income ceiling higher than getting paid via welfare/Social Security?

There is plenty of work to be done. It's just not paid work. How do you propose to coerce people to pay for this work?

I propose to replace welfare/disability fraud/etc with a guarantee job (FDR style) that pays in-kind benefits. I.e., if you claim you can't find a job, the government will give you a job fixing our crumbling infrastructure, providing child care for working women, or similar things. In return you get a room in a government dormitory, a healthy meal from the government cafeteria, a government track suit, etc.

Now the "sit at home playing video games and get free money" choice has been removed. You'll still have a minimum standard of living, but you must contribute to the world rather than simply living a life of leisure. I.e. shared responsibility.

I don't want my children to be taken care of by people forced by the government to work. I would want them to enjoy that work AND be skilled in it.

No one is forced to do anything. Anyone who doesn't want a government job is free to refuse and make their own way in the world - in fact, that's the preferred option.

If you are actually saying you don't want your children taken care of by someone doing it for the money (or prefer a person selling the "artisinal child care" persona), that's fine. Many wealthy people in the west can afford to hold out for such things.

Others are less picky and just need a responsible adult to keep their children from eating poop or dying of thirst, and teaching them a little Marathi is just a bonus. Should those people be deprived since the service doesn't meet your standards? Note that public schools mainly just meet the latter standard - should we get rid of them also?

It is a matter of how that job offer is set up. If the terms are "pick one of these 100 government jobs or we cut your benefits" then clearly the people you will get for that job will be different than your standard public school teacher, who is supposed to have studied for that job (at least that is how it is in Germany). IF on the other hand you establish child care as a proper job that people can take or leave, just like being a public school teacher, then that would be adequate. But I would want some government regulated certification for that job, because what being a "responsible adult" means is too vague and too subjective for child care.

So, if child care is just another job (as it is now), what would your proposal mean? Basically, that the government pays for an army of child carers, and that that army would be funded by tax. Just like the public school system.

As I said repeatedly above, the basic job guarantee is just another job. It pays primarily in-kind benefits (i.e. rooms in govt dorms, govt cafeteria food, etc) and little money, and it's available to anyone who wants it. Also welfare is eliminated the day we create the basic job (or after some phase-in period, more realistically).

So basically yes, the government will pay for an army of child carers, an army of infrastructure fixers, an army of trash picker uppers, etc. It just won't pay very much and most of what it pays will be in-kind benefits rather than money (e.g. rooms in government dorms in low cost areas).

It's interesting that you are suggesting people who are currently on government benefits are disproportionately unsuitable for child care. Can you expand on this? My attempts to fill in the blanks here lead me to the idea that poor people are irresponsible and morally defective (e.g., they might ignore it when children start hitting each other with rocks), but I suspect that isn't a claim you'll endorse. Could you clarify in detail what you mean?

> So basically yes, the government will pay for an army of child carers, an army of infrastructure fixers, an army of trash picker uppers, etc. It just won't pay very much and most of what it pays will be in-kind benefits rather than money

This did not seem to work for Soviet Union (and its reluctant allies), and market realities still exposed themselves - if you wanted to hire a government plumber, repairman, electrician, dentist, etc., you were welcome to sign up for a long waiting list or miss a few appointments here and there, because hey, what exactly is the accountability here? They won't fire you.

If you actually needed to get the job done, be prepared to offer a generous tip, which in absence of solid money would have to be something bartered (vodka, spare car parts and gold were among the unofficial currencies pervasive in USSR).

Once such economy evolves, even the people who were trying to put in a minimal effort at their government-sponsored job just stop, because they feel they're getting the shorter end of the stick than the guy accepting generous gifts. Moreover, people at the occupations that are not typically monetized in a market economy (librarians, for example) start thinking of good ways to establish some barriers to force consumers towards such generosity (by withholding high-demand books, not providing information in a timely manner, etc.) Now a portion of a population is on an active mission to create problems in society rather than solve them, as their additional monetization efforts depend on existence of such problems.

This second-order effect seems to penalize the poor (and un-connected) even harsher than before.

The Soviet Union had only this system, nothing else. I'm proposing is using this kind of a system to provide government services (e.g. filling in potholes) in return for money we are already spending.

In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector. I'm proposing no restrictions on the private sector - in fact, one explicit goal of this system is to make government dependence less pleasant (you need to go out into the national park and build trails rather than sitting at home playing video games) so that more people enter the private sector.

> In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector.

AFAICT, this was strictly true (if at all) only between the first Five Year Plan and 1936; the private sector (that is, non-government directed business) was restricted in both what markets it could participate, and the forms of business (in most markets where private industry was allowed, the only business form allowed was the individual independent worker/owner, to use the language of capitalist economy) but it was not nonexistent.

Ok. The only thing I'm proposing doing is reducing the disincentives to joining the private sector. Comparisons to the Soviet Union are nonsensical.

> The only thing I'm proposing doing is reducing the disincentives to joining the private sector.

No, that's not all you are proposing. You are proposing a particular mechanism that you claim is aimed at that goal (not merely proposing the goal itself), which has concrete features beyond just the goal you claim for it.

> Comparisons to the Soviet Union are nonsensical.

Perhaps, but you haven't provided a reason to believe that, just offered a factually-incorrect distinction between your proposal and the labor policy of the Soviet Union.

In this dual system what happens to the government-run pothole-filling entity (and its employees) when it's outbid by a private pothole-filling contractor on most/all jobs?

Then the private pothole filling entity gets the contract, and the government directs it's dependents to do something else.

But it'll actually be pretty hard for the private sector to compete on any task requiring unskilled labor. The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work.

Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instead of giving people money NOT to work, we instead give them money to work. I'm not proposing communism or slave labor.

> Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instead of giving people money NOT to work, we instead give them money to work.

No, you are actually proposing giving them money, whether or not there is work, and then trying to scrounge up some (perhaps meaningless) work so that the money you give them cannot be used for personal development, small entrepreneurship, etc.

> I'm not proposing communism or slave labor.

Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts) labor through economic coercion rather than chattel slavery, but I'm not sure that the difference is meaningful, especially if there really is a problem of a growing-over-time number of people unemployable at any given time in the private market due to changes which render their labor superfluous given the available alternatives.

No, you are actually proposing giving them money,...

We already give them money. I'm simply accepting that this is unlikely to change.

Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts)

The labor is not forced you are free to turn it down. We have no way of knowing whether the labor is economically inefficient, due to existing market distortions caused by paying people not to work.

In any case, unless you are claiming that there is no valuable government work to be done at all (are you?), it's a little silly to suggest that my plan to redirect idle labor into providing those government services is inefficient. The labor is either wasted or it's consumed.

> The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work.

The motivation for the overseers is clear. The worker bees have two choices - work hard (and get paid) versus do nothing (and get paid). Why would the workers go for the former versus the latter?

Presumably, when ordered to work, the benefits would be cut off if the work was refused or performed unacceptably.

I mean, otherwise this whole mandatory-work-for-benefits thing doesn't make any sense (not to say that its a good idea even then.)

I think the idea is that the jobs the government entity does are government-demanded jobs, and that private entities won't be given a chance to bid on them; they'll be reserved to the government and the pool of people it keeps out of regular work by reserving work for the command segment of the economy.

Right, if one introduces monopolies on certain job sectors, it's not a dual system, it's two parallel systems.

There are some short-term issues as far as performance and accountability for those hired into such monopolies, as well as aynrandian incumbency protection, such as rejecting light bulbs as too many are employed in the candle-making sector.

and for people who arent physically capable of doing these jobs? if we're dismantling welfare system then how are these people surviving?

what about people who get illnesses that take them away from work for extended periods? people needed multiple surgeries, months of physical therapy, assistance of medical devices, etc.

is healthcare included in this government job? if so, what isnt covered? if not, how are people expected to stay healthy enough to continue working?

mental health care?

how are these people expected to save for retirement?

are people over the age of, say, 75 expected to work as construction workers if they didnt save enough for retirement?

How and when would these workers have the time and money to become trained for better paying careers? does this job come with some tuition programs also?

you mention trash pickers, why wouldnt that be automated, or is this a scheme by which we outlaw the automation of sectors of the economy in order to protect these government jobs?

would these workers/companies compete on the open marketplace with others, or would this be a government monopoly?

if its not a monopoly, say im hired as a child carer. what do i do when one day theres no child to take care of because people dont want the shitty government child caretakers, they want to private ones? do i get fired? do i get paid to sit in the government office and wait? can i go home? is this an economically efficient use of a persons time?

if im to sit and wait in an office until the end of the day, how is that different than a UBI other than i have to sit in an office all day?

Please don't put words in my mouth I didn't say. It is a matter of motivation, you need people who are motivated to do a job and skilled enough to do it. YOU brought up the public school teacher as an example, and I like it. A child carer needs to be compensated with money, just as any other professional or teacher, because money means choice and power. A child carer should not be forced into a salary race to the bottom, and it is ridiculous to assume that a child carer would want to work just for food and a roof over his/her head. This is NOT a deal any responsible adult in my opinion should take, and somebody who takes that deal is per se disqualified to take care of my children.

This is 100% wrong. We have a large surplus of labor, and no demand for it. Wages have been stagnant for decades. If there was a demand for labor, wages would be increasing. They're not. It's common for a minimum wage job (or below) to have 200+ applicants.

You're suggesting that when 200 people apply for a single waitress job, all 200 should be hired? That's going to be a really crowded restaurant. The Fire Marshal might have a problem with that. How many people do you need to hand you your burger anyway?

Agricultural jobs are out. Less than 2% of the workforce now produces more than double the food the entire population needs, plus exports, cattle feed, pet food, biofuels, and agricultural products used in manufacturing, etc. Manufacturing is rapidly going the same direction. Soon less than 2% of the population will be able to manufacture way more stuff than we need. That leaves only the service sector. The service sector is a weird beast, ranging from the below-minimum-wage waiters/waitresses (for which there is no demand) up to professionals like psychiatrists (where we really do have a scarcity). But at the moment, at least, costs of higher education are skyrocketing. Sending those 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of school to become psychiatrists would enable some few to excel, but what about the rest? And what about the cost?

Having 200 people serve you your burger is not a solution. Forcing 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of higher education is not a solution. Forcing children, the elderly, and the disabled to work is not a solution. The main problem is a lack of demand for labor, and the only way to solve that is to artificially create a demand. But now you're just paying people to dig holes that don't need to be dug and then fill them back in. That's useless and degrading. Why are we even doing that? What is the law of nature proclaiming that anyone who doesn't spend most of their life making someone else richer should die of starvation?

We need to rethink the basics. We need to rethink what we expect of people and why. This is not a futuristic sci-fi singularity thing, this is something that is happening right here and now, and it's already affecting us.

The main reason most countries don't force those on welfare to work is that some of the current recipients will say "screw this I'm not working for peanuts" and turn to theft, selling drugs or prostitution. If they were allowed to just be they would entertain themselves at home. So you have to be willing to accept this increased crime tradeoff for this to work.

So poor people are a bunch of stationary bandits and we pay them money in tribute to prevent them from harming us? What horrible people you make them out to be.

(Note: I have no problem with people who sell drugs or sex and think both should be legal. I'm referring specifically to theft here.)

I'm not sure why we need to accept this increased crime tradeoff. Why can't we (here "we" refers to folks who are willing to work for money rather than steal) just wall ourselves off from them?

Most aren't, but some are, and as there is no way to separate the good from the bad you have to take this into account.

I'm just pointing out the main flaw in this plan and the reason it (as far as I know) has never been implemented. You can argue against a strawman all you like but it's not going to solve any problems.

Why is there no way to separate the good from the bad? Just have a strict "one strike and you're out" policy.

It's certainly a fallacy to say that a plan is impossible because no one has done it before; everything has a first time. It's irrelevant in this case, however. FDR implemented it, it was called the Civilian Conservation Corp and it was awesome - we got a national park system out of the deal. India does it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rural_Employment_Guar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

South Africa and Argentina have similar programs but I don't know as much about them.

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_534.pdf

http://www.epwp.gov.za/

> FDR implemented it, it was called the Civilian Conservation Corp and it was awesome

Its an awesome solution to a particular kind of transitory unemployment (and, at the scale it had at its height, perfectly sensible when there is a large, national, temporary economic dislocation) where you expect that the kind of work that people were doing before will be in demand again.

Its less good as a way of dealing with long-term structural changes in the economy -- either in the proportion of people employable at living wages in the marketplace or the jobs demanded. Particularly the latter, since locking people into public make-work jobs with mostly or entirely in-kind, survival-necessity payment provides little opportunity for adjustment to labor market changes.

There is no way I would trust someone to mind a child if they are being forced to do it.

> Maid, cook, child care

...

> Americans just refuse to do them

Lots of Americans work as cooks, work cleaning homes, or work in child care. Wages in all three of those areas are quite low, there's not demand for a lot more that would provide livable wage in any of them.

>That may happen one day, but at the moment we have a scarcity of labor rather than a surplus.

Then why have real wages dropped for much of the population, and why is the labor share of GDP at an all-time low?

First of all, this is a non-sequitur. Market prices can go up or down while scarcity still exists. Scarcity is simply a situation where a lot of people want a good or service, but not all of them can have it.

Secondly, your claims about market prices are not even directionally correct. Real wages have dropped because compensation has shifted from wages to benefits. (This effect is larger at the bottom, since non-wage benefits are a fixed cost while wages are variable.) Real compensation per hour has only gone up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

The labor share of GDP is down mainly because investment income (primarily from housing) has increased faster than labor income.

https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

Also, significant chunks of the economy have moved into non-labor personal income as the government has shifted from infrastructure/public goods to wealth redistribution.

If we're talking about economics, I'd say that a 'scarcity' which isn't pushing wages up isn't a scarcity worth thinking about. Money talks.

Compensation per hour is being pushed up. What's so special about taxable wages as opposed to non-taxable benefits?

If taxable wages are preferable to non-taxable benefits, should we eliminate the various laws (e.g. Obamacare, 401k) that push employers to provide benefits rather than wages?

Also, there are many market distortions that won't push wages up but will still create scarcity. For example, we could simply ban food vendors/cigarette walas/etc, or we could impose various occupational licensing rules that raise wages for some while lowering them for others. Why are those not worth thinking about?

Interesting. It seems like a big culprit is high cost of living, which makes many jobs no longer worthwhile. Any ideas why it's so much higher in the US than in India? Is it due to landlords?

I discuss in the article a bit. India is more capitalistic than the US, at least in this regard.

Their safety net is a job guarantee rather than the US's ragbag of free money programs (welfare, disability fraud [1], etc), so you don't get to enjoy a life of leisure under any circumstance. In the US, it's pretty easy to get free money and play video games all day.

Second, their regulatory structure doesn't destroy as many low skill jobs as ours does (e.g. in the US, a cigarette wala like Eric Garner gets executed, and the cops shut down many food trucks).

[1] NPR did an expose a while back on the massive levels of disability fraud in the US. Apparently it's now a shadow welfare system, significantly larger than actual welfare: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Americans expect and demand a lifestyle most Indians only dream of.

For example, electric power consumption per capita is 765 kWh in India, 12,988 kWh in the USA. [1]

1: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

Admittedly, the vast majority of India is nowhere near as cold as the vast majority of America. Americans have to spend energy avoiding death by frost much of the year.

Like many living in the southern USA my air conditioning expenses are much higher than my heating expenses, I'm sure many Indians wouldn't mind air conditioning either.

If we were willing to accept India-like population density and energy use, we could all live in the parts of the US where that's not the case.

Definitely not, but it needs to be explicitly discussed. The previous claim seemed to have the implicit assumption that any retraining/reallocation is de-facto impossible.

Automation isn't unambiguously bad news for society at large, although you would expect it to be negative for the people being automated. The extent to which this can be mitigated by retraining/wealth transfers is an interesting question that depends as much on the country's culture and political climate as the properties of the technological advancement.

I think if you're going to reject 200 years of historical trends you ought to have a pretty good justification for why this time it's different.

But extrapolating 1850s trends onto 2020 makes perfect sense, gotcha.

> There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output.

Er, no.

A fall in non-skilled wages does not lead to an increase in demand for non-skilled labor output. It leads to an increase in supply of non-skilled labor output. This, under usual conditions, leads to some combination of decreased market clearing price and increased market clearing quantity of those goods.

> In 1850, 60%+ of the American labour force were farmers and over the next 100 years their jobs were automated out of existence by range of more efficient 'robots'. This was no-doubt harmful for many specific farm labourers, but didn't 'screw over the economy'.

Since the 1850s, quite a lot of social support mechanisms have been adopted within the US economy, largely to deal with problems encountered during the process of industrialization, including the displacement of traditional labor (including farm labor).

The idea that further disruptions of that kind might need improved corrective measures when the cracks in the compensatory mechanisms are already visible is hardly outrageous.

1) 'Quantity demanded' would have been more precise (and more verbose) than 'demand' but you tell exactly the story I was attempting to.

2) I was critiquing the claim that 'automation reduces efficiency', not the claim that there could be distributional issues. You are attacking a straw-man.

"This was no-doubt harmful for many specific farm labourers"

I hear that argument all the time, but I wonder if it takes into account the ever increasing pace of technological advancement.

I think the labour-market effects of technological advancement are slower now than they have been at any time in the last 100 years. The internet and mobile phones have large impacts on media-consumption and social dynamics but they aren't dramatically reshuffling the labour force in the same way innovations like the combine-harvester, container-ship, car and washing-machine did every decade between 1900 and 1970.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

And with the Civil War and the two World Wars, it greatly reduces the need for jobs.

This only makes sense if the robot consumes as much resources as the human. I think a robot would consume far far less. Maybe 1% of what a human uses at most.

1. To build a robot you have to mine raw materials and refine them and assemble them and program them. This takes a while, but to build a human worker you need to feed, house, clothe and educate them for 18+ years.

2. The human can only reliably work 8 hours a day. During that time you need to provide ample overhead lighting, and heat or cool thousands or millions of cubic feet of air to a comfortable temperature (this alone takes a tremendous amount of energy). Outside of those 8 hours, the human consumes an entirely separate structure that also has to be lit and heated and cooled. Further, the human has to be fueled with food that has to be grown out of the ground or via livestock that has to be carefully tended.

The robot, on the other hand, can stay in one place it's entire life. Doesn't need much light or temperature control. It runs on electricity which can be easily generated compared to growing a cow or a field of corn. Eventually it may even be solar powered. Aside from that it will work 24 hours a day without complaint (with some occasional maintenance).

So, if you replace 100 humans with 100 robots, you might use the extra resources of 1 additional humans. Now, if out of those 100 humans even 1 of them does something productive that can't be done by a robot, you've got a net win. I think the resource consumption advantage is tilted heavily towards robots.

I think you're likely underestimating the resources it takes to make robotics work. They get better all the time, but they do so by a lot of blood sweat and tears. We haven't even managed to make them walk at all convincingly yet, it's a really tough problem. As messy as the virtual world can be, the real world is a lot messier. In the long run robots are almost certainly cheaper, in the short term though they are usually very expensive resource wise.

I think the counterargument here is that if you don't need to move humans to work and back home again every day, and if you don't need to optimize workplace conditions for humans - by providing creature comforts and safety equipment - your unemployed human is using much less resources than a working human, and the robot is also using much less resources than a working human, so the sum of unemployed human + working robot may add up to less than working human alone.

That, and also resources are here to be burned for our comfort. We should, by all means, burn the minimum amount of resources required for said comfort. But still, there are here to be burned. Otherwise, to minimize resource usage, let's all give up on civilization and go back to caves.

>Otherwise, to minimize resource usage, let's all give up on civilization and go back to caves.

We can't go back, unless we are willing to kill off most of the population. If we give up just one hundred years of technology we have to destroy every forest in an attempt to grow enough food. All seven billion humans giving up on society and going back to a hunter/gathered society would lead to an immediate collapse of most ecosystems.

We are certainly consuming too much to be substainable right now, but at the same time the amazing efficiency improvements that civilization has brought us are the only thing that make it even possible to live on this planet with seven billion other humans.

> resources are here to be burned for our comfort.

Shouldn't we also consider comfort in the future?

For that, we must manage resources to avoid exhausting them or destroying ecosystems, because that would create a very uncomfortable future.

Of course! I meant exactly that, though I guess I could have stated that more explicitly for clarity.

We the unemployed are just warehoused at home? In that case, they consume less resources from lack of commuting, but they still eat and do everything else they would have.

Having to maintain human-comfortable conditions at workplaces consumes a lot of resources.

>That, and also resources are here to be burned for our comfort.

what an incredible argument to make.

Why exactly? It's what we do, since we first tamed fire.

you are suggesting the purpose for resources existing at all are purely for human consumption.

essentially you're peddling the argument of "god put oil on earth for us to burn, if we dont burn it, its a waste!"

Well, if not used by us, then they just are. They have no other purpose but the one we assign to them. It's like with that whole "save the planet" thing. The planet doesn't need saving. The planet doesn't care. It's we who care about having a habitable and pleasant environment.

I probably didn't make it clear enough, but what I'm suggesting is to use available resources to create better world for us and every future generation. The argument is more like "god put oil on earth for us to bootstrap a sustainable technological civilization with it".

"Purpose" is a human construct, so yes, in as far as oil can have purpose, it is for us to burn. And if burning oil would result in a net increase in utility, then not doing so is indeed a waste.

Hence the communist manifesto dropped 200 years too early. Countries that use communism are far too early at adopting the philosophy because it requires production to exceed consumption on a massive scale. The hybrid model in mixed capitalist/welfare doesn't work so well because we're introducing a labour force (robots) that doesn't fit our economic model.

Edit: What we'll probably see is an introduced free basic income to help the economy along (and the people who lost those jobs) at the expense of other tax payers. And that, my friends is gravitation toward the end of capitalism. If we're talking 60% of the labor force.. Seems like it anyway

Communism is the ultimate future of human beings ;-)

I fail to see how it's the employer screwing anyone over. Should automation be outlawed? What kinds of automation? It's a problem that society needs to deal with, sure, and some of that might involve some regulation of automation, or some social support for manual jobs, but there's nothing inherently immoral about automation. If a company reduces it's work force through automation there's nothing immoral about that. If they don't do it, someone will start up a rival company that automates from the get-go and drive them out of business.

This is what's killing the French economy right now because their labour laws mean employers are biased against hiring new workers. If they have to lay them off it costs a fortune. So existing French companies are locked into high cost structures and are being driven up against the wall by competitors with higher levels of automation on the one hand and massive redundancy costs on the other.

I am not in any way arguing for unregulated market forces and let the devil take the hindmost. We do need a balanced and sustainable solution that allows business to thrive and gainfully employ the population and automation is making that harder, but the key word there is sustainable. A French model that tries to freeze the current labour economy in aspic isn't sustainable.

> I fail to see how it's the employer screwing anyone over. Should automation be outlawed?

I would look to the automation in scheduling in the service sector over the last couple decades for a pretty clear example of employers screwing over labor. Sure, you can make a good argument, as you do, that it's probably more amoral than immoral and the inevitable result of a race condition among the competition. But it's hard not to read articles like these articles in the New York Times[0][1][2][3] and not feel like employees are getting screwed pretty hard and that it's only the plausible deniability that the appeal to market forces offers that allows executives in these organization and politicians in the communities where these people live not to see the pernicious effects of their policies.

I know some politicians have begun to take note and offer some sympathy and protections.[4] But I think that now that full automation is gaining more steam, finding that balanced and sustainable solution most of us would probably like to see is only going to get harder. In the meantime, we're seeing in this election very clearly how the some (many?) of the displaced have decided to articulate their solution to the problem.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/business/late-to-bed-early... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/manipulating-the-w... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/business/starbucks-falls-s... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/business/retailers-scrutin...

These stories are heartbreaking to hear ... I sometimes wonder what the answer might be. Perhaps regulation that puts limits on a) the lead time employees must be given for a schedule, or b) limits on how chaotic a schedule can be (ie. generally mornings, or generally evenings), or c) a max # of hours between shifts to allow employees proper rest ??

You're right, this does feel like the employees are getting screwed ... especially when they can't even commit to anything else like school because of the chaotic nature of their schedule.

How does outlawing automation make employers biased against hiring new workers?

I didn't say that it does. However one of the justifications given by the French left for high redundancy payments is to compensate workers if their jobs are taken by automation, so they are related issues.

>This is what's killing the French economy right now because their labour laws mean employers are biased against hiring new workers.

No, that's just what French employers like to whinge about the most in the business press.

French labour laws are unique to France. France isn't the only country in Europe suffering from economic malaise - most of them are. The unifying feature is EU budgetary rules - austerity - not the fact that French employers can't use the threat of firing as a terror tactic against their workers.

One more for the huge but reliably fruitless pile of good arguments for an unconditional basic income: with an UBI, it becomes possible for the worker to outprice the robot even at a rate below the survival minimum. E.g. to consume 1.5x resources total compared to bare survival, which would still be less than the nearly 2x of unemployed+robot.

(edit:typo)

Undoubtedly there are edge cases where that's true. But as an argument for UBI it works only if the cost savings from labourers being willing to undercut market price of robots in a UBI-era world across the whole economy exceeds the net cost of making welfare payments to a vast number of other people previously ineligible for them.

At present, the numbers of people claiming welfare because their skillset has been superseded by automation are vastly exceeded by the number of people on federal minimum wage jobs or choosing not to be employed...

And that's even before you look at the distributional impact of the subsidy (the benefits from cheaper labour tend to accrue to a subset of business owners; the cost of subsidising it is shared across all taxpayers, with the net burden probably falling on middle class wage earners)

If a government were to decide that preserving jobs in a particular automation-threatened industry/locale were worthwhile due to the difficulty of finding alternative occupations, a targeted subsidy per job would be far more efficient

I guess it's more of an argument for a universal wage subsidy, but I'd be happy with UBI as well.

I've been thinking about UBI a lot. Who's going to pay for it? Certainly not the big tech companies. They barely pay any taxes now, and they're the ones who stand to gain the most with automation.

Don't forget that if nobody gets paid then they can't consume all the wonderful output the robots produce.

Ideally, it would be financed using a mix of fiat currency and taxes. Then it could take the place of debt growth for building the monetary base. If inflation becomes too rapid, the mix would be tilted more towards taxes. If deflation hits, the mix would be heavily tilted towards fiat.

"A mix of fiat currency and taxes" is somewhere between poorly described and downright incoherent. Fiat currency is a thing you can use for money, taxes is a way of gathering money (whether its fiat currency or not) for the government.

Do you mean a mix of printing money and taxes -- e.g., just outright abandoning the idea of independent central banking and separation of monetary policy from fiscal policy and using a mix of directly printing money and regular taxation to fund the benefit?

If so, I think that's a poorly conceived idea that, in the best case, has no advantages from running monetary policy independently with similar priorities to those that drive it in principle now (managing inflation and unemployment), while paying UBI out of general government funds while funding the government through a mix of taxation and debt as now.

A sufficiently low UBI (survival, not comfortable survival with all kinds of nice-to-haves) would be wage subsidy (or microentrepreneurship subsidy, or subsistence farming subsidy) in all but the most extreme cases of zealous frugality combined with a heavy disinclination to work. Excess money beyond survival is a very strong incentive, much stronger at least than replacing survival level welfare with survival level earning, which is what existing systems routinely expect to happen.

If the worker now gets to stay at home and pursue a hobby they enjoy, while the economy is still producing the same amount of goods, isn't that a net win?

The problem is (a) people feel bad about being on welfare, and (b) we stop paying welfare again the moment that worker makes any money, creating a disincentive to engage in any form of small scale productive activity.

I do believe it is a win all around. It isn't just that folks will stay home, but it makes it easier to have a better educated population, easier to work fewer hours if you decide to work, easier to exercise and eat well and be healthy. All around, I think society will improve.

Some of the pro-basic income folks (and myself) believe that a basic income helps with both of these points. There isn't much stigma to getting welfare that everyone gets, though possibly the extra that those that need it get.

And since it doesn't stop, there isn't that sort of disincentive towards going to work as work simply enhances it - folks might actually be more inclined to work, albeit fewer total hours.

Even with current welfare systems, there are ways to minimize these things. Creating a tapering system so that folks are Always better off working, more trust in the welfare system itself, and not treating recipients like criminals or second-class citizens.

People feel bad about being on welfare because they want to work. They want to be productive. They want to have a purpose.

beep beep

I. am. a. person. I want... proooductive. I want... puurpose. I will. Take the orders. From a capital-supplier. To proooduce economic vallll-ue.

I. am. Totally. Not. a robot.

beep beep

Seriously, though? People want to be exploited because they need a wage-paying employer to give them purpose? Then where are all the people who don't work for someone else getting this much-vaunted "purpose", eh? Whatever happened to all that individualism stuff, about people being ends rather than means?

Work is exploitive only when you're not compensated adequately for it, or if you cannot leave that job voluntarily. And I assume that by "people who don't work for someone else," you are referring to people who still work rather than, say, landowners who collect rents whose main work is to go to the bank to make a deposit.

People can be both ends and means and be quite content. Personally, I think there is too much emphasis on people being ends unto themselves in the current culture. Madonna is a great example of this. She ceased to be entertaining more than 30 years ago, yet I still come across news snippets about her. Why?

> People can be both ends and means and be quite content. Personally, I think there is too much emphasis on people being ends unto themselves in the current culture.

That's because society is really nothing but a lot of people working together in an alliance. If we didn't make people themselves the end they would have no reason to participate in society.

Does humans have any value outside of what they can offer to corporations? Would there even be any point to keeping humans around?

It works the other way around: do corporations have any value outside what they can offer to humans? Is there any point to keeping corporations around?

I guess I should have added a sarcasm tag ;)

So, do people laid off with outsourcing to Asia enjoy their model trains and gardening now? If history is any predictor, any gain in productivity from automation is going to be absorbed by corporate structures instead of going towards welfare.

And what does he think that having high living standard is about, other than burning resources?

By his definition of efficiency, a dead planet is the most efficient.

The burning of resources by robots doesn't by itself contribute to a higher living standard, unless you're measuring the living standard of robots :-)

You are correct, yet I don't see the connection between your reply and the comment you replied to? Nor even to the parent-parent comment. I'm baffled. Similarly for maxerickson's comment here. "Living" is about using resources, if "saving" them is the goal a dead planet is the best solution, or at least removal of all consumers of the resource in question. I don't see any "robot vs. worker" component in that statement.

Living is about converting resources to utility. The argument assumes that you care about overall efficiency of such conversion.

js8's comment wasn't about efficiency.

I thought the point of having robots is to produce more so more can be consumed by people, having higher living standards. Robots (as described in the article) do not have living standard, because they don't have consciousness. They are conceptually no different from any other tool, which requires maintenance, but increases productivity.

So they eventually should contribute to higher living standard (that's their raison d'etre), although of course there are issues of social inequality, which however the OP's argument doesn't seem to address at all.

The efficiency in economics is always defined under assumption that it's somehow externally given (by human desires) what we want to produce. For example, efficiency in producing 1000 cars is given by how much materials and energy you need. But you cannot say that producing 100 cars is always more efficient than producing 1000 cars, because this is given by human desires; by that logic, the most efficient would be if Earth had no humans or even life at all.

My favourite resource is time.

The worker would be using vastly less resources. In my life I spent so much money/time/energy commuting to work and everything that entails having a job, not to mention time wasted in adult education, post grad degrees, trainings, etc I would never need as non-working welfare person. Heck, college is questionable as well. So there's a majority of my debt/spending there, ignoring my mortgage. Also, a robot doesn't need breaks, a cubicle, vacation, etc so its using vastly less resources.

Businesses would be forced to compete so those savings would be passed to the consumer which means a lower cost of living. Not to mention taxing automated businesses to pay for this new welfare/UBI/whatever.

Seems like a win-win to me once things shake out.

You're not factoring in the utility created by freeing up the worker to enjoy themselves. They're consuming the same amount of resources, but they're much happier as well.

Sarcasm? Happy to be laid off? Note that I'm not for keeping people employed in useless jobs, but saying about laid-off workers that "they're much happier" is a little weird to me. It would be good if that was so, and the fact that it isn't to me is an indicator that the system does not work well, because it should be that way - but it isn't.

Well the original argument assumes that the welfare is equivalent to their salary (otherwise they'd be consuming less resources), so yes they'd probably be happier.

I'm not sure that this widespread assumption on HN that most people would continue their education or pursue interesting hobbies if they had sufficient income to not work is correct. Most people would sit around the house, get high and watch the tube.

Work provides much more than the goods produced and services rendered. For many or most, it also provides a sense of identity and purpose and well-being. When there's no work available, a lot of that is replaced with negative behaviors, not some noble pursuit of improving humanity.

The unhappiness seen in low income neighborhoods isn't solely due to lack of resources. Hell, a lot of times in the U.S. people on welfare are materially better off than farmers who eked out a living during the Depression. What's at least as destructive is the sense that there's no purpose in life.

The bright future of AI, robotics, and automation providing a robust supply of material wealth, combined with UBI, will be millions of people sitting stoned or drunk in front of the tv while their children entertain themselves by hacking robot-driven trucks to make them crash into each other.

I think the people sitting around the house will probably notice that they're not happy, and seek out other things to do. I think the main reason people on welfare don't currently do much is that they can't afford the alternatives. There are also class cultural differences that can make it difficult for them, but I think there are ways to address this.

More generally, I think in the absence of material problems, we will have many more resources freed up to address the problem of purposelessness. I do think it's easy to succumb to depression-inducing laziness in the absence of necessity to work (I have experienced this myself), but I think this is a psychological problem that should be addressed directly.

>while their children entertain themselves by hacking robot-driven trucks to make them crash into each other.

And then those children age in a world where they never have to stop being children.

>And then those children age in a world where they never have to stop being children.

That is a truly horrific thought.

Why can't we create programs to help people engage in activities that they find meaningful, while at the same time connecting with others in their community?

Your post hints at some deep human needs, which our current culture heavily assumes must be met by a traditional job & economic production. It may be a painful transition, but it isn't difficult for me imagine a society that relies on other endeavors to meet these needs.

Local arts programs. Maker shops. Fairs and sporting events. Mentoring programs. Maybe some kind of part-time thing that resembles a college or university in many ways, and it doesn't necessarily end after 4 years. And so on.

In fact, human nature being as it is, after several decades, a stigma would likely develop against those who chose to stay at home and not get involved in any of the programs, similar to the stigma against being unemployed today.

People just want to be recognized and valued, and to feel a sense of personal progress. There are many ways to do this. Look at open source for an example of a community that achieves these things without any money exchanging hands.

That assumes that all the worker cares about is money. However, not having a job has psychological consequences, and the chances for being able to switch to another job are reduced dramatically the longer one is unemployed. Humans are more concerned about their outlook than their current condition, and the outlook for the unemployed worker is worse than for the employed one.

If the person knows they will reliably receive the same salary as when they were working, their outlook is at least as good as it was before. And should they wish to improve it, they have plenty of time to explore ways to do so.

And certainly people want to feel valued, but there are far better ways to achieve this than doing pointless repetitive work, and not all of them require employment.

Yeah, that's a good point. Though work could be both positive and negative utility-wise. I guess that depends on the job.

The big issue with such a situation is that for the worker, there is no difference if they work or not, since they are anyway in both scenarios earning the bare minimum to survive - so in essence such a system is stating in practice that the value of that labor is already zero.

However, in a concept where the "bare minimum to survive" is unconditional, then the incentives of employer and employee become aligned with the true situation of economy, since the amount that the employer would be replacing by automation is equal to the amount that the employee is getting above that bare minimum, and the decision to automate this task or not becomes the same for a particular employer as for the whole economy.

Also, even for the classic welfare model, this argument fails in the normal case where there cannot be workers earning the bare minimum to survive, as there is a labor price floor, the minimum wage, which is supposed to be (and in any currently functioning welfare state, actually is) a "livable wage" that's strictly larger than the bare minimum to survive, and larger than the long-term benefits such a worker would receive.

As I understand it destroying/preventing automation is an example of the broken window fallacy. The problem is not automation, but rather the system that punishes a worker for being displaced for the sake of efficiency. The economy would be burning .8x the resources, as you admitted the efficiency increased, and my worker on welfare does not consume more than when not on welfare.

"Bastiat used the parable of a broken window to point out why destruction doesn't benefit the economy. In Bastiat's tale, a man's son breaks a pane of glass, meaning the man will have to pay to replace it."

I realize now where you are getting the 2x, but if you are paying a full man's wages to power a robot you really need a different energy provider. The costs of powering and maintaining a robot are a fraction of the cost of a human.

Doesn't all of the money that was going into the operating cost of the robot still end up in human pockets? Instead of going to the worker it goes to robot developers, robot maintainers, and energy companies.

Then the argument it increases inequality, but that's been the case since industrial machinery happened, as Piketty showed.

Don't think about money, that only confuses things. Think about resources instead. Imagine that the worker burns oil to survive, and the robot also burns oil to function. Now replacing the worker with the robot makes the economy burn twice as much oil for the same amount of production (assuming the worker goes on welfare). If you think in terms of money and pockets, the picture will be more complicated, but the end result will be the same.

This logic is full of holes. A robot can, by not needing to rest, be vastly more productive than the same person. The robot can be designed to never make a mistake too. Indeed, automation of all aspects of bread production would increase the bread supply. And the person needed bread either way, so unless you're saying that their death is the alternative, what they do with their day is irrelevant. And about fuel, I guess "burns oil" tugs at more heartstrings than "burns solar energy."

    > This logic is full of holes.

I don't agree. The commenter said that now both the robot and the worker use resources. It's gotten better if you only look at the business and ignore the laid-off worker.

Note that I'm always for such improvements, the solution for a broken system should not be to let people do useless jobs (like the road workers whose sole job it is to hold up a "Stop" sign in a construction zone).

I think the argument is solid, but not that impactful. Sure, worker + robot = seems like more energy used than worker alone. But robots will be more efficient, probably impressively so if you factor in energy savings on human commute and maintaining "habitable" (for lack of better word) conditions in the workplace. Lights, HVAC, safety equipment, etc. Given that, it's not inconceivable that welfare humans + working robots could use less energy than working humans alone!

But that's all besides the point. Even if energy usage E(humans+robots) = 2 x E(humans) (and I suspect it's more like factor 1.1x), it's still worth the cost for the quality-of-life increase for those humans. Economy should not be about optimizing its random and fluctuating "productivity" function. It's about improving quality of life for humans.

The argument is talking about the marginal case [1] where the robot is about as cost-effective as the worker it's displacing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_concepts

But robots don't burn bread. Their ongoing input costs are only a tiny fraction of a human's, that's why people buy robots even though their up front cost is usually much higher than hiring a person.

The point is that the robot replaces the worker only on the business level - but in the economy the worker is still there! And in today's world either often gets no job or a worse job.

But doesn't this rest on the assumption that a working worker uses the exact same amount of oil as a worker not working? I don't think that assumption always true. Or am I missing something?

I agree that the factor might be 1.5 instead of 2, or even below 1 in some cases.

Or into the pockets of the owners of the robots who develop, maintain, and power these robots.

Hopefully the worker gets another job so now you have a productive robot and a productive worker doing something else.

Has that worked the last few decades? And don't just count "job yes/no", look at the actual job - prestige, quality, income.

The proportion of people in full time work is much higher than it was when people worried about mechanization eliminating all those not-very-prestigious jobs in the post-WWII period...

My comment was pretty short - yet you managed to ignore a major part? Looking at statistics telling you that now both adults in the family have to work to home ownership to private debt levels doesn't support your story. Look at the number of dual-income families, for example.

Is there any income quartile in any developed country that has less prestigious or lower real incomes per full-time worker than the equivalent in the immediate post war period? Disproportionate rises in house prices and growth in consumer credit and student debt are consequences of a region having access to better employment opportunities, not worse ones.

Yeah, if you assume that workers never go on welfare, the argument falls down.

I think the decision to automate is usually based on the capital cost of the automation, with the productivity/consumption ratio of the automation usually being higher than the displaced workers.

Take a robot truck. The difference in energy consumption per mile will be nil, but the auto truck can easily and safely drive 168 hours a week, compared to the death march legal limit for humans, 70 hours.

The per mile cost of the automation system will also likely be close to nil (a few tens of thousands of dollars amortized over a million miles).

So a system that isn't really more expensive (compare the up front cost of the automation to several years of labor) is more than twice as effective.

When workers' wages are lowered/replaced by a typical welfare program as a result of automation, the workers no longer have the purchasing power to purchase the goods produced by the automation, thus rendering such automation useless.

If prices for the end user do not decrease proportionately with the savings created by automation, the whole point of automation is nullified.

> Unless you're willing to kill the worker

Talk about black and white reasoning. The loss of his job is supposed to reduce his income, making him poorer, thus forcing him to consume less resources.

But you're right in the sense that being poor increases chances of dying, thus contributing to solving the problem of dealing with useless workforce.

> Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive

We're talking about automation, so we're talking about developed countries.

By that logic, society should have collapsed already. The combine harvester automated the work of millions of peasants-with-scythes, and that was decades ago.

And yet most people agree that society is better now that most of us aren't forced to spend all day scything the fields!

For any mass replacement of humans with robots, you will need AGI and with that will come ethical issues of treating robots as humans themselves.

By having robots you are only replacing humans with a biological body with humans with a robot body.

> he goes on welfare instead

he goes on to do something higher level, something more human.

that's easily(?) fixed with a flat tax on efficient robots.

While we're at it, let's tax people whenever they write a Python script to read information out of a spreadsheet instead of hiring an intern.

I mean, just to point out, if the way to avoid a doubled usage of resources is to kill a guy, you can always kill the employer and sack the management.

Or to be less flippant, this kind of reasoning only makes sense if you assume that the split of revenues between the state, the worker, and the employer overwhelmingly favors the worker and the state. That doesn't seem like a situation in which the employer chooses to hire someone at all, actually, so I'd consider it somewhat unlikely.

My current theory is that this “automation bomb” won't really happen in the sense that 5 million Truckers are going to get laid off all of a sudden. Especially in the case of Truckers the average age is getting higher and higher every year because Millennials have said that is not a job they want.

So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there won't massive amounts of laid off Truckers sitting around. It will be under-employed Millennials, which is the same issue we have now.

That's how it works when the fundamentals shift, and it's hard to see because it's not like you lost a job - you just never got it to start with.

One of the problems is that there aren't any openings in these jobs - at least not for somebody who isn't already trained and experienced. This is common across many fields. Nobody wants to invest in training anymore, so there are tons of openings for skilled workers with certifications and 5-10 years of experience, but few entry-level positions that would get you to those 5-10 years of experience.

> So my theory is that as Baby Boomer/Early Gen Xers retire automation will step in and fill the employment gap. So there won't massive amounts of laid off Truckers sitting around.

Young workers used to take those jobs, though. The young (especially men) are underemployed right now. If you're right, they are the ones hurt the most in the long run by automation.

I think the better question is why don't/haven't Millennials taken those jobs as previous generations did. This is a problem that has occurred outside of the technology debate.

There has actually been quite a bit of discussion around this. Here's one article discussing it [1]. It's a combination of factors including low pay for the number of hours worked, social stigma/low respect, huge amount of time away from home/fun activities, and the fact that driving just kind of sucks. Also, as another commenter mentioned, trucking companies have not made it all that easy to get started from zero skill/certification recently.

[1] http://www.overdriveonline.com/trucking-or-not-with-the-twen...

I think it honestly depends on the political climate at the time: If it looks like a heap of truckers will lose their jobs, the government might step in and try and legislate sideways for jobs to remain - think mandating an operator for safety reasons.

I'm not a national of Australia but spent a significant amount of time there in the lower echelons of the auto industry; There the government could see that the local auto manufacturing industry was being priced out by lower-cost SEA operations, and not wanting to have "hard-working Aussies" lose their jobs while in power, were pressured into heavily subsidising (> 40%) some factory workers' salaries.

A couple of party changes later and this was wound back, and almost immediately the two largest employers in the sector announced they were pulling out.

The net result was that instead of some workers losing their jobs gradually, or the plants freezing hires and people seeing this an being incentivised to look at alternate industries for light-labour positions, several thousand workers are expected to be laid off all at once some time next year - fodder for a media shit-storm.

It's a bit off the topic, but the question is, where would those workers be if the government subsidies were instead used for educating/re-training?

There's also the economy of truck stops, diners and motels that depends on all those truckers. They're going to be hit hard.

Indeed. I did not realize what a staggering fraction of blue collar jobs in the US are related, directly or indirectly, to long haul trucking: nearly 9 million. Disappearance of this industry will make the deindustrialization of the rust belt look absolutely trivial by comparison.

https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-goin...

The obvious solution is more labour-intensive non easily automatable jobs i.e. service economy. There is a limit of how much laptops and trucks economy wants. But there is no obvious limit in demand of quality services like education, health and leisure.

I want to be surrounded by caring people and care for others. That's natural.

Question is how to re-orient, re-train and re-educate people to both provide those services and consume them.

For each advertisement of yoga lessons and massage sessions I see hundreds of ads on new smartphone or car. That is ridiculous, because I need single car and smartphone, but could go to yoga and massage every day.

edit: typos

"If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, 66 percent of jobs in finance and insurance could be replaced, the most recent report says."

If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, probably >99% of all jobs could be replaced, 'cause it's pretty close to passing the Turing test. I'm willing to get monthly payments from anyone who wants to bet until this happens, and then pay out monthly payments after this happens till I die.

The difference between your comparison is that automation of finance/insurance would be achieved purely by mathematical calculations performed by software, while the automation of many/most other jobs would require much more complex robotics.

I read the parent comment as; getting to the point where computers understand speech that well, is a far more difficult challenge than a large number of robotic challenges.

Another one of these articles. It's almost like there is a robot somewhere writing them...

"Job insecurity is a central theme of the 2016 campaign, fueling popular anger about trade deals and immigration. But economists warn that much bigger job losses are ahead in the United States — driven not by foreign competition but by advancing technology."

Technology in and of itself destroys and creates jobs and it will keep doing so until all human wants and needs are satisfied (i.e. never). While automation of manual farm work in the 19th/20th century eliminated farming jobs - which accounted for a huge majority of jobs; it didn't eliminate jobs.

The main thrust of this argument isn't even This Time It's Different, because reasons, it's just "pay no attention to the history of automation".

Why would David Ignatius lie about this? Because the popular anger about trade deals isn't misplaced at all. It's absolutely accurate. That is what is driving job losses, income losses and poverty - not technology.

The rhetoric from 'elite' economists about the robotjobpocaplyse is simply an instance of the 1% trying to dodge pitchforks.

It appears like the logical conclusion of capitalism: the majority of people being made redundant due to AI/automation, and a small handful of corporations basically ruling the world.

Compare this to the logical conclusion of capitalism that Marx put forward 150 years ago. For him, capitalism creates an ever-growing proletariat, a majority of the population being transformed into a commodity; individuals become interchangeable, and are payed only enough to have their basic needs met. The proletariat as a whole was a necessary condition though. Their labor produced value, the surplus of which went to the owning class.

Your take is similar, but instead now people will actually become redundant. Not even producing value anymore.

Things did not exactly turn out the way Marx thought they would. I certainly hope your prediction won't either!

my prediction isn't necessarily a gloomy one. once people become redundant in terms of their labour there are many possibilities. I see VR playing a leading role :)

Depends on us if that's the end of history, or just a stage though. ;)

"Politicians need to begin thinking boldly, now, about a world in which driverless vehicles replace most truck drivers’ jobs..."

Can we replace politicians with robots?

Reminds me of a Buckminster Fuller quote:

>"I'm going to give you an important kind of a picture. I hear a lot of people say "I don't like machinery and technology it's making a lot of trouble", so we're going to take all the machinery away from all the countries of the world, all machinery, all the tracks and the wires, and the works and were going to dump it all in the ocean. And you'll discover that within 6 months, 2 billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain. So we say, "that's not a very good idea, let's put all the machinery back where it was".

Then, we're going to take all the politicians from all the countries around the world and we're going to send them on a trip around the sun, and you'll find we keep right on eating. And the political barriers now...scientists say very clear you could make the world work and take care of 100% of the people at a higher standard of living than anyone has ever known despite the increasing population, but you can't do it with the political barriers, any more than you can try run a human organism with a wall between the ear, the eye, and the stomach. It is an organic whole, it is total industrialization."

Somebody elected them, so they are not the cause but he effect. Even a guy like Trump finds a lot of support from voters. So it seems to me ranting about politicians is like treating the skin rash when someone has measles. Sure, choice is very limited especially in winner-takes-all systems like the UK or the US, but even so, the politicians you get can then be viewed as consequence of the system, so again the secondary issue.

Technology has been reducing the need for human labor since the invention of the plow. And yet we aren't all unemployed hunter-gatherers. You could argue that 'this time it's different', but you have to at least acknowledge that luddites of every generation have made similar claims and been wrong every time. Literally tried and proven wrong for centuries.

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply

What is different this time, I think is that we're giving up our main advantage: Intelligence.

Humans have always been able to fall back on work no animal/machine can do, but we're running out of work that machines can't do.

The video is a well articulated argument, but there are two large gaps in reasoning that are common with this line of thought.

Grey ignores the idea that technology also allows for normal people to do jobs that used to require highly skilled specialists. A big part of this is so called 'brain' labor. A banker before computers had to have amortization tables manually calculated. Now the personal banker who does your HELOC probably doesn't even know basic algebra. If we ran technology in reverse and took away the calculators we would end up with fewer banking jobs not more. Because every banker would have to be highly specialized and costly. The "factory jobs" were originally an invention of technology. A method to take a large number of workers + automation to beat artisans and specialists. If Watson is doing diagnosis, that means that more people with less training can be effective 'doctors'.

Which brings me to my second point. Often when things become more efficient we end up using more of them overall. Jevon's paradox applied to labor. Think of what it cost to transport 20 tons of cargo from NY to SF before trucking and standardized containers. How many man hours were involved? How many different specialized jobs? Now done by one guy with a truck replacing them all. Yet the number of people employed overall in transportation went up not down. IMHO the best example is IT. Think about the server admin ratios in the early days. Perhaps a team of 10 to maintain a single mainframe. Now we have 10 guys in a data center managing 50,000 servers. Yet the overall number of people employed in IT went up not down. As processes become more efficient and cheap we consume more of it at an increasing rate.

> Grey ignores the idea that technology also allows for normal people to do jobs that used to require highly skilled specialists.

Computers are much better at highly specialized jobs than people are. And the amount of things they are not good at is slimming down all the time.

> If Watson is doing diagnosis, that means that more people with less training can be effective 'doctors'.

And it'll eventually improve to the point that we won't need 'doctors'. It'll get to the point that your average person can be their own 'doctor', because most of the work is shelled out to a computer.

> Yet the number of people employed overall in transportation went up not down.

Because even with more automated, cheaper shipping, we still had jobs that robots couldn't do. But more of those jobs are disappearing every day.

I think your logic is skipping over the fact that computers don't have hard limits like humans do. If a computer can't do something, just give it a handful of engineers, and some time, and it'll eventually be able to do that. Once a computer gets better at a task than humans, there's no reason to ever go back to humans. It's a one way street.

Sure, computers can't do everything we do now, but they will. It's only a matter of time.

You're conflating technology that is available today with challenges which occur only after we have AGI. When those are different problems with different time horizons.

Post AGI. Obviously robots do everything. Post AGI it is the technology singularity as we have recursively improving superintelligences. Unemployment in this scenario is a trivial issue. Strong friendly AI would solve so many problems that unemployment would be one of those historical footnotes. Concerning ourselves with 'what happens when computers are better than humans at everything?' is akin to asking 'what should we do after the rapture?'

Prior to AGI, human + computer is the norm for most tasks. Similar to my banker example. You'll have specialized computers augmenting human productivity. In each case driving costs down and in most cases usage up. Specialized computers will make it easier for humans to do jobs they couldn't do before. Even if truck driving becomes fully automated there will still be humans in the loop somewhere. It will just mean a more efficient ratio of man hours per ton shipped. Which is not a fundamentally different issue than dealing with any other efficiency increase.

> your logic is skipping over the fact that computers don't have hard limits like humans do. If a computer can't do something, just give it a handful of engineers, and some time, and it'll eventually be able to do that. Once a computer gets better at a task than humans, there's no reason to ever go back to humans. It's a one way street.

I don't deny that. Merely that we've been headed down this one way street for a while and the houses keep getting nicer. I keep hearing that Efficiency Avenue will take us towards human suffering, but we've been heading this direction for centuries and never arrived there. In fact everything about what we have seen so far says we should travel as fast as we can down that one way street.

There is nothing to be replaced by in the first place, because most jobs are just arbitrary, and non-required. Not all, but most. I'm sure most people could get by on a fraction of what they actually do.

It just comes down to, people don't really know what they want. That's why we work like we do in the first place, most jobs are just jobs for the sake of it, 9-5, Monday to Friday keeping peoples minds occupied and keeping those at the top important. This includes "special" titles like, CIO, CTO, CEO etc.

Ultimately humans need very little to be happy and survive, but instead we have invented economies and lots of arbitrary stuff, luxuries, we don't really need, jobs are how one gets those useless things.

When I hear about AI and robots taking over the world, taking our jobs etc, it's nice to be able to say, "oh well, there goes sitting in a building 9-5 like a goldfish in a bowl". It's also sad for the robots :(

Even if this time isn't different, "luddites of every generation" are not always wrong about short term effects. It's not acceptable to say "most people without college educations are probably going to be screwed over, but it should all work out eventually". In the past, technological advancement has changed jobs rather than eliminating them, but life also sucked for most workers in the past.

Basically what I mean is that you shouldn't look at the Industrial Revolution and think "that went great, no need to worry". This time should be different, because we can learn from history and not just stand back and hope for the best.

It is true that in some cases there are short term negatives for a small group of people within a specific trade. In exchange there are large benefits to society as a whole. Large enough to outweigh even the small groups inconvenience. I.E. I would rather be a permanently unemployed dock worker today, than a gainfully employed dock worker in 1900.

There is certainly an argument to be made regarding the pace of change, and retraining/educational opportunities. But the automation driven job-pocalypse just isn't going to happen.

Macy’s to Close 100 Stores as E-Rivals and Discounting Hit Legacy Retailers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12277307

E-Rivals === Amazon. Amazon uses lots of robots for their distribution centers -- they even purchased a robotics company and the subsidiary is called Amazon Robotics.

I still think the major issue is trade agreements and the importation of foreign labor in using H1-B visas to replace STEM (think Disney and Abbott Pharma replacing their IT workers with H1-B visas) and H2-A and H2-B visas replacing blue collar workers. Do the numbers. The technology is sensationalizing.

Although Amazon replacing Macy's is Internet automation and Robots in the warehouses.

I'm prone to saying my job is to build robots to do my job for me. Any time I can replace my own labor with a robot (script/program), I do so. I won't ever run out of work, because software is inherently creative. It's the uncreative jobs that rely on humans as muscle or control mechanisms that are in danger.

It's not like humanity has never gone through this before, either. Two centuries ago, 98% of people were employed in farming. Today, it's more like 3% and falling. But it took generations for the robots (farm machinery) to take over. It wasn't as rapid as, say, the rise of self-driving trucks will be.

A lot of software development is far from creative. Many company projects involve making versions of X that do Y (Facebook for the enterprise!), or modifying an existing tool to fit a new requirement. A lot of it comes down to putting together existing pieces, and while there aren't a lot of solutions today that can accomplish this effectively without humans, I think it's a bit short-sighted to think there won't be in the future and that just because you are a developer you are exempt from this.

I've been creating software professionally for over 20 years. The only tools from the start that are still in my toolbox are Unix (now Linux) and SQL. Java didn't even exist when I started, nor did Python or Ruby or JavaScript or even Apache. But my job feels basically the same. It always will, because the problems are always out there at the edge. They're incredibly specific, and often at the bleeding edge of what software can do.

Basically, software meets human needs. You need humans to come up with problems to solve, and describe them specifically enough that a computer can be programmed to repeat the solution. So those creative tasks, and the discipline of turning vague human ideas into strict logic, those aren't going anywhere, at least not with the tools we have today, or a reasonable extrapolation of those tools into the future. Programming languages may change, but the existence of programming languages does not. You still need humans to figure out how to say what they really mean.

On the other hand, I could spend days or weeks configuring a development server old-school, or I can run 'vagrant up' and have a perfect, repeatable development environment that works on any server. That's the robots. I love the robots.

As time goes on the necessity of a for-use economy becomes more and more apparent. A for-profit system where human labor becomes less and less necessary is going to lead to a massive concentration of wealth and the destruction of the economic middle class.

It's time to accept that a worker planned economy is necessary. Not a government planned one, but one run by the people for all society. Personally I propose a syndicalist economy. Profit where the citizens in society don't see returns, or can only exist by living off of government assistance bodes a very grim future for all mankind.

What if people with jobs worked less ?

You think through the eyes of idealism. Consider this

You are the owner of a fortune 500 company

You need to hire enough people to fullfill 1600 hours a day, 14 days per paycheck.

You want to hire the people as cheaply as possible.

If the individual knows they only have to work 20 hrs per week to survive, they have the power to negotiate. If the individual believes that they have to work two jobs for 60 hrs per week to survive, the company has the power to negotiate.

Why would you pay more money for same value and less negotiation power?

In your ideal world there are enough starving/superficial/ambitious people that you can pay pennies for exponential growth.

Sorry, I don't understand your point in the historical context. Original labour conditions in factories were horrible. The conditions did not improve through economic rationalization but because society recognized it as wrong and forced factory owners to employ better working conditions.

Its slso possible they werent sustainable. Worker strikes snd unions will definitely put a hamper on your production. If people cant support children or they know a job is a death sentence, when an opening comes up due to a strike they may not be too eager to work

Yes, I trivialized a complex social evolution on my comment to make the point that labour conditions were not changed simply because it made sense economically in the factory owner's yearly budgeting. The main driving factor was recognition from all around that the labour conditions needed to change for ethical reasons, and the factory owners had to acquiesce to the demands of the society.

Are you talking about the gov? If thats the case, you should look into the history in regards to unions and unethical labor practice. I think it was this year that a whistleblower revealed that lithium was being mined by children. I appreciate you think we have "evolved" but really we just wear better masks

Working conditions for programmers though have become amazingly good without unions or government intervention, just through competition for workers. See the perk inflation in Silicon Valley in the Google years, or just wage inflation in general.

It depends on your definition of good. Programming is an office job with low customer interaction (most times), but on the other hand, you might be working quite a bit of overtime or be subjected to meeting after meeting. All without having a decent vacation or sick leave policy.

I'd argue that such things like limits on workweeks, paid sick days that do not risk jobs, and 3-4 weeks off a year (mandatory!) would mean a lot more than the perks over time, but I very much doubt that stuff will happen without government intervention.

Perhaps this is a geographical problem. I've always had paid time off, sick time etc as a working programmer. But I have been working in Europe. I know Americans get less sick time and vacation time but I'm pretty sure it's more than nothing.

Being subject to too many meetings is a pain but most workers would hardly see it as a major quality of life issue.

Heh. Probably is. I'm in Europe, but moved from the states. A lot of European countries either have a really strong tradition of giving paid time off and sick time or have those sorts of protections written into law.

There is no such thing in the states. While some companies give vacation, a lot of folks have trouble taking more than a few days off at a time even if they have 3 weeks worth. A few give sick time - paid vacation, but it still counts negatively towards attendance at times. Yet still more folks get absolutely none of this. Admittedly, a lot of programmers won't get this short end, but they probably feel pressure to work even when sick and sometimes have trouble taking vacation time.

There are federal laws that grant some unpaid leave for serious injury only if you work at a qualifying company for a long enough time. A few companies will give partial pay and some folks buy insurance to cover such things.

Thats a supply and demand issue though. If disney has taught us anything its that an entire IT team can be replaced by H1-B. Silicon Valley tends to hire mit grads or savants. As those skills become more prevelent however, the demand for those individuals will be driven down. Right now a very small portion of the world cam program and even smaller are good at it. If it becomes more common though, these good wages will no longer be necessary

Businesses have been doing everything in their power to reduce the cost of programmers. Offshoring, lobbying the H1B system, Agile, get everyone to code initiatives, overly broad non-competes, etc. One day they will get it, but they haven't figured it out yet.

Imagine how much programmers would make if they were unionized. I would imagine at least double.

You'd have to unionize globally though, and that'd be very hard. The incentives to undercut a unionised workforce are massive. Yes there's been some outsourcing but I also know many companies that are squeamish about remote work and insist on having local workers even in high cost localities. Unionised workforce and constant strikes would get rid of that squeamishness double quick time.

I wouldn't think so. Previous unions started one company at a time. If the company has US workers who are willing to unionize, the union has instant power to block or limit many attempts to gut the workforce through offshoring, etc.

I think a big part of this is that they concentrate on younger programmers. Too many stories of older ones unable to find a new job to be anecdotal by now. The younger people are much less experienced and are eager to work and neglect family, which often they don't even have yet. I think that shifts the power quite a bit.

Yes, we can only wonder what amount of value programmers could capture if they had any more leverage at the wage negotiation table. Given that the stereotypical engineer is half-ashamed to ask for a raise and is half-embarrased to admit he gets paid I can only imagine the current wage levels - although driven by supply and demand in programmers favour - are breadcrumbs when compared to the true value generated.

One may also pay pennies for bullets, likely better to move both you AND your money overseas while you still can.

Is this a threat? This will happen everywhere. There is no escape. Big brother will be watching, already are. This isnt some new crazy concept. This is why unions exist, strikes occur, nationalism and anti-immigration is prevalent. The difference now is that the replacements are truly dumb and spineless while before they were simply desperate enough to pretend

For jobs where 40 hours per week has basically the same productivity as 30 hours per week, that's fine. For jobs where context is important (medicine, software), 'working less' will cause a disproportionate hit to productivity. Some problems you can't throw more people at. That's more or less the thesis of the Mythical Man-Month, and it applies to many careers. Though there are probably plenty of careers (like driving trucks, certain kinds of teaching) where you can lighten the work load and hire more.

No, you can't lighten the work load for trucking (without automation). Over the road truck driving doesn't benefit from reducing hours and hiring more, since OTR drivers basically live in their trucks for three or four weeks at a time to maximize flexibility in moving freight. You would need more trucks to accomplish that, and there's already a driver shortage since there aren't enough Millenials willing to do the job.

The other thing is that driver pay has declined considerably over the past 25 years (stagnant since the early 90s, minus inflation), so it would cost trucking companies more (more trucks, more drivers) while decreasing wages for individual drivers. OTR truck drivers are paid by the mile.

Third, the increased costs for moving freight would end up increasing the costs to consumers for all goods moved by trucks, which is pretty much everything.

> Over the road truck driving doesn't benefit from reducing hours and hiring more, since OTR drivers basically live in their trucks for three or four weeks at a time to maximize flexibility in moving freight.

So give them three weeks on, three weeks off. Or have them drive shorter runs, handing trailers off to other trucks for 'long hauls'.

To your other points, I wasn't commenting on the economics of pay levels for truck drivers. I was saying if everyone was happy with the wages, some tasks (leaving the concept of 'a job' to the side) can certainly be divvied up among more workers without a major loss in productivity...

The only objection I could see to that hypothesis is that there's a shortage in the natural talent pool so that there aren't enough workers to allow a shorter work week. Maybe there aren't enough patient, healthy, and alert people (or whatever the other qualities of a good trucker are) to handle three times more truckers working one-third as much. That's an empirical question at the end of the day.

With that in mind, it seems unlikely to me that makes sense to have three times more brain surgeons working one third as much.

They will be paid less. Ultimately a company hire more people and it's harder to havve more workers for the same amount of work.

In france we have a 35h per week system, it's a basis but it's not really ideal either, many companies need to use "heure supplementaires" but they cost more.

1) Why would you pay them the same for less work?

2) Once a machine can do the job, why would you hire a human at all?

>2) Once a machine can do the job, why would you hire a human at all?

Because we need a point in our lives, otherwise we will make up some gods and start killing each other. Jobs keep us busy, keep revolts down. Most frustrated and aggressive people are those without jobs and daily schedules.

True in theory, but Spain has been in a state of mass unemployment (>20% unemployment rate, >40% youth unemployment rate) since 2010, and it still is among the top 25 safest countries in the world ( http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/safest-countries-in-the-w... ). Portugal has been over 13% unemployment rate since 2011, and it's the 5th country in the world by that same index.

I would imagine they have much better social safety nets than in the US. In the US, if you are unable to work, for whatever reason, you are pretty much on your own.

Sure, but the point in the comment I replied to was that we need to keep people busy (not only with their material needs covered) to avoid violence and revolts. The case of Spain or Portugal seems to tell us that as long as people have basic needs covered, they don't necessarily fight or revolt much.

Yes, you can keep plenty busy with things that don't pay. Art, traveling, gardening, exercising, etc. In fact, most of those things get pushed aside when people work.

Watch a movie "Where to invade next". EU countries where designed completely differently, in some countries welfare takes more than 60% of taxes.

2) Comparative advantage

the underlying message from the top is rather brutal (or with a healthy dose of realism?): "No matter if you're farmer, factory worker or good with your hands, learn to code or be prepared to get swept away."

Obama's message to the kids about learning to code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XvmhE1J9PY

But the only reason for having vastly more people with coding abilities is to lower the price of coding. There is no need for so many coders. Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once, then replication is free - that's even worse than in industry, where everything needs to be developed just once too but at least production required people.

>Every app, every piece of code has to be written just once, then replication is free

This is true in terms of physical reality, but not in terms of the patent system.

Which is human-made and not a property of the universe. That is not an argument for OPs comment, since it can be changed very easily. Nor does it have any influence even if it isn't (changed) - I don't see the relevance for this sub-discussion?

>Which is human-made and not a property of the universe

Precisely my point.

>it can be changed very easily.

It would seem this is not the case, though I wish it was.

A few things to consider about robots:

* They require high tech manufacturing to maintain

* They require a power source (electrical, hydraulic, etc)

Humans while not maintenance free... or power source free (food is a powersource) don't require a ton of technology to get working. While the quality is probably not as good as a robot due to an inability to be perfectly consistent it can be good enough.

I'd endorse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_worl...

Can any one recommend any recent books or articles on this topic? I'm particularly interested in what the current suggestions are for solutions (if any), which this article doesn't tackle.

I highly recommend Yanis Varoufakis: The ex Greek finance minister who was in office during the Grexit crisis. He advocates basic income as a solution.

This is a speech rather than an article, but I found it pretty relevant and compelling (He starts talking about AI at 7:50) [Yanis Varoufakis: Basic Income is a Necessity] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss

I'm not really sure we are going to see the kind of job losses from robots/AI that people fear, not within the next 10 years anyway

We already experienced automation for decades. Has that lead to higher unemployment? If not, why will it lead to that in the future?

Doesn't this reasoning hold up for outsourced jobs as well?

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