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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

Consider a broader timeline. It used to take humans over 500 hours of labor spinning, weaving, and sewing to produce a single shirt.

Automating textile production has "put more people out of work" than computers ever will. Do you think for a second we would ever want to go back to how it was? Do you ask the inventor of the sewing machine how they will start giving back?

These inventions free humanity for more worthwhile endeavors. Nobody will look back after the next great transition and wish we just had more humans driving trucks around the country. It would be utter lunacy. And the people who created the self-driving machines will be seen as liberators of human potential and ushers of a new era of productivity.

So it is, same as it ever was.

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Well yeah a lot of unemployed textile workers did go into poverty or even starve to death at the time. I've read some speculation that the first industrial revolution was a net negative on society initially, and took many decades to actually improve the average standard of living. There was a reason people gathered in mobs to break the new machines. They were hungry.

But still the industrial revolution didn't really replace laborers. The machines were still quite limited, and humans were still needed to do the jobs machines couldn't do. What's different this time, is soon the machines will be able to do everything humans can do. Or at least everything an unskilled worker can do. Operating a machine in a factory, driving a truck, entering data into a computer, making phone calls, these are all things machine learning is capable of.

Lastly look at horses. The invention of trains would seem to have competed with them and taken many of their jobs. But instead horses vastly increased, because trains couldn't do everything horses could do. Then cars were invented, and the horse population crashed over just a decade.

Why did this happen? Didn't the invention of the train prove that automation doesn't take horse jobs? Shouldn't there always be new jobs for horses? Can't horses specialize in the 1% of tasks that cars can't do, like transportation in places without roads?

But that didn't happen. The cost of just feeding the horses was much higher than the cost of buying an automobile. There were some obscure jobs for horses left, but nowhere near enough.

I think this is factually incorrect. Women used to spend the majority of their free time spinning thread and sewing clothes for their family. The average person owned three outfits total, and wore basically one outfit every single day.

The industrial revolution dramatically increased both production and consumption. We now own different outfits for every day, dozens of special occasion fashions which must be regularly replaced and updated, etc. Total production, and total wages paid by the industry has dramatically improved.

A shirt a couple hundred years ago would cost $4,500 at minimum wage to produce. But no one paid the equivalent of $4,500 for a shirt. What actually happened is a lot of the work was virtually or actually completely unpaid.

The machines drove a vast increase in productivity and GDP and provide a standard of living today which 200 years ago would have been bad science fiction. The machines drove down cost of production dramatically, increasing consumption and increasing overall employment and wages.

People didn't destroy the machines because they caused poverty, they destroyed them out of fear.

Your analogy with horses is deeply flawed. Horse used declined just like spinning wheel use declined - because they were obsolete.

The latest round of automation does not by any stretch of the imagination make humans obsolete. It will actually make humans more productive and actually more valuable.

As Steve Jobs said, computers are a bicycle for the mind. AI is a motorcycle. Get on, go faster, reach higher, achieve more, live better.

Everyone knows that in the long run the industrial revolution was a positive. But at the time, the disruption caused lots of misery. Farmers were driven from farms that had relatively good living conditions, to cities with awful working conditions, living conditions, and lower wages. Eventually things improved, but it didn't happen overnight.

What does it matter if there are more clothes, if there aren't any consumers to buy them? We are looking at a world where humans are obsolete just like horses. There is nothing an unskilled worker can do that a machine can't, at least in the near future. And many skilled workers do jobs vulnerable to automation as well. The vast majority of the human population is unnecessary, just as horses were after the invention of cars.

Do you really believe this? Horses can become obsolete because they are a domesticated animal, they are a tool. Humans are really something quite different.

It is truly an insult to humanity to think; all these people doing menial jobs which could be automated are now obsolete. That they are somehow incapable of higher thoughts and reasoning and cannot add value beyond the machines.

In fact, while certainly there is a range of inherent potential between humans, my understanding is that the nominal human capacity for creative thought is orders of magnitude beyond the point of obsolescence by any kind of "artificial intelligence" we expect to be able to create at least within the next century.

No, certainly we have not yet created anything even remotely like the machine that will be our master.

The average human, as we have asked each generation of "average" human before us, will use technology to reach farther than you can imagine they would ever be able to reach.

And also, it's worth considering, how very much we tend to under-estimate the intelligence of historical man from our lofty perch of technological superiority, just as we under-estimate our future potential.

My favorite quote from I, Robot is a man questioning the intelligence of a robot. "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" The robot replies, "Can you?"

Most humans aren't that special. Long before alphaGo beat one of the best Go players in the entire world, simple Go programs could destroy the majority of players. Sure, AI probably won't be able to do computer programming for a long time. But the average person with an IQ of 100 is not going to retrain to be a computer programmer. AI doesn't need to be as intelligent as the best humans, it just needs to be as intelligent as the average person. Probably much less than that, because the average job is boring repetitive work that doesn't necessarily require much intelligence.

I mean seriously, where do you predict all the unemployed people will go to? What jobs do you think are invulnerable to automation, and can absorb 90% of the population? What jobs have such great economic value, require lots of unskilled workers, and can't be replaced by machines?

It's actually clearly unsustainable the way we're consuming clothing and pretty much all goods, I read in s book published recently that if everyone in China purchased a new pair of wool socks tomorrow, we would be out of wool.

Guess who is getting an appetite for wool socks?

I often feel what will replace jobs is people just going to school and earning a PhD or two or three. It'll certainly destroy their idle time of unemployment and make them and everyone else - the collective a whole lot smarter. Perhaps subspecialties emerge with dual-PhDs.

I often hear that not everyone is capable of getting a PhD, but then again if we take the same energy and dedication of a career and push it over into education I think plenty have the capability. I often consider myself exhibit A so to speak since I got my GED and was working three low end jobs (line cook, gas station attendant and construction worker) until I bounced out of the workforce and pursued my PhD in Public Policy. I'm sort of playing around with undergrad level math now as I prepare for a second PhD. Seriously think if I could manage at least one PhD anyone else could easily manage 2 or 3.

OK, but is there a demand for so many PhDs? Having a PhD doesn't really guarantee a good income now. It will be worse once everyone has one.

This makes sense, if there is some sort of government sponsorship or grants, but providing these to all people would mean drastically higher taxes, and companies are opposed to those.

It's not about the demand so much in my view. Post graduation, people move onto research. The site Innocentive comes to mind sort of in regards to developing a form of compensation. Rewards for discovery. Nature had a partnership with that company for a bit but I believe they went separate ways.

I think the funding issue can be figured out without higher taxes or at the very least without absurdly higher taxes. Perhaps one idea would be to train people to invest through grades 9-12, have some sort of basic minimum income which isn't rich but isn't below poverty either; encourage people to invest with those funds and use profits to pay for college etc. I also sort of align with Jaron Lanier's concept of paying people for their data usage; but built onto that maybe so that it includes both government and private companies usage of that data; individuals don't see those funds until 18, from which they are encourage to go to school. As those funds are held they are invested like social security maybe? None of these ideas are really all that worked out just yet, just responding to you is all.

Not every job needs a PhD and the purpose of university isn't to prepare you to get a high paying job.

It's not about high paying jobs. It's about just occupying people's time, giving them something to do. Perhaps high pay; or at least a pay of some form can come from patents/copyrights developed with such knowledge however.

Until basic needs are handled, you can't just say "it's about occupying people's time". People need to eat, clothe themselves, and shelter themselves, and all three require a steady source of income.

If you want to push widespread welfare or UBI for those in academia, that's an entirely different option. But that'd require a serious revision in the current tax codes or some very wealthy benefactors to bootstrap.

So, basically bmi/ubi is what I'm assuming when I talk about this. Just it's post that, what I'm trying to answer is "what will people do" essentially when there is no jobs and we have bmi/ubi. I sort of just assumed readers figured such a system would need to be in place already as jobs are automated. Probably should not have assumed that, my bad.

Sorry but this is wrong, your clothes aren't being magically created by automated sewing equipment, they're being made in the third world, and hundreds of hours go into garments, The reason you work the treadmill to keep buying them? Planned obsolescence.

See http://truecostmovie.com for more information.

This common narrative that, "automation" will let us finally get to tackle the real issues really is a myth, it's just going to make a larger wealth distribution problem because most companies leading the charge won't pay appropriate taxes.

If truck driving could've been offshored, it would've been.

Side note, I have a blanket in my family weaved from hemp by an ancestor, it's generations old and it's still in really good condition and we still use it all the time on the couch, 500 hours? Maybe, but its over a hundred years old!

It's the spinning and weaving that's been automated, which was the bulk of the manual labor. Sewing the cloth of a fine dress shirt takes between 30 minutes and 4 hours, says Quora.

For that shirt, you work an hour to earn $150, pay $50 in payroll/income taxes, pay $100 for shirt, of which maybe another $20 of that will also be taxes (sales tax at the point of sale, and then income tax on the corporation, not even counting taxes on the materials and wages that they buy with the remaining $80).

Figure around half of every dollar you spend is either taxes on the way in, or taxes on the way out. The problem is decidedly not a lack of taxes.

You're neglecting other steps, cutting, button holes, ironing etc, this is also not a pair of jeans, handbang or other more complex garments.

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