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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Yet we don't have 70% unemployment.

That's true, but that should not lull us into complacency. Some day we may run out of productive things for unskilled human labor to do, the same way we ran out of things for horses to do (http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply). Not everyone can be a software engineer, and even if they could, we probably wouldn't need 7 billion of them.

Yes, but that also means humans are usually more resourceful than what we can imagine in the first place. Look back also in the early 1900s where all major newspapers were proclaiming the end of world and massive famine if we ever reached 1 billion people on Earth, and look where we are now: virtually no famines anywhere (except in war zones and in the worst dictatorships, which is now a minority) and the population is still growing and poverty is decreasing progressively. This would have been unimaginable 100 years ago.

So, let's not fool ourselves with predictions. We are notoriously bad a predicting long term trends.

PS: the analogy with horse is wrong in so many ways (because horses are not humans and cannot adapt like humans) but this would be another topic altogether.

Humans as a species are pretty resourceful, but individual humans often not so much.

The problem is that throughout human history the demand for unskilled labor has exceeded the supply, and that has been the foundation of our social contract: work, and you eat. Don't, and you starve. But some day soon, technology could make that assumption no longer true, at which point we could have big problems unless we radically rethink how our society is organized. That is something we humans have historically not been very good at.

  Look back also in the early 1900s where all major newspapers were proclaiming the end of world and massive famine if we ever reached 1 billion people on Earth"

"It is estimated that the population of the world reached one billion for the first time in 1804." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_milestone_babies

>> Not everyone can be a software engineer, and even if they could, we probably wouldn't need 7 billion of them.

If we all put our backs into it, we can make sure that we need at least that many.

We just have to write really bad documentation and really sloppy code, which lot of people believe we are doing already.

With a bit of effort maintaining the software being written today will become such a monumental task that no Soft Eng will ever be out of work for millenia to come.

Have you heard the anecdote about the fox with fleas? It lowered itself into a river, very slowly, giving the fleas enough time to move ahead of the water. In some versions, it was holding a leaf in its mouth. In others, the fleas just gathered on the tip of its nose. Either way, when eventually all but a tiny fraction of the fox is under water, it ducks under completely and the fleas all float off downstream.

When the fox's shoulders went under water, I bet some of the fleas said "ten minutes ago 70% of us lived below the fox's shoulders and yet they're all still on the fox, so there's nothing to worry about."

There are a number of assumptions, key among them are the fox is definite extent and if it is, we are near it's nose already.

is going up the nose an option?

Only if the given flea is driven to be 'disruptive' ;-)

No, we developed lots of non-essential busy work to cover for it and sold it as "services".

So how does that work? The government/rich people/"capital" conditioned people to consume services whether they need them or not, in order to create these jobs? If so can you give some examples of this? Or is it that government/industry created regulations and practices that created these jobs (I could think of law as being like this, but not many people work in law, less than 1% of non-farm employment in fact)?

My take is that we use the labor that was being used in farms for new productive purposes including health, education (as consumption, not investment) and entertainment. It's undeniable that life expectancy is increasing so we are getting something out of this increased efficiency.

Services which generate way more revenue/profit and better waves for employees than individual farm workers. I dont think we have lost anything as a whole, on the contrary.

I'm not comparing it to farm work, but to what it could be.

You don't seem to realize that allowing labor to move from critical/essential work to nonessential work is a good thing. That's how the system is supposed to work. What would you call sommeliers, chefs who create Michelin-rated restaurants, movie stars/writers/producers, surfing instructors, etc if not nonessential?

Automation makes things cheaper. Look at food, it was the largest expense for most families for a very long time. Now for most families in the US it's not even close. We have taken the jobs that used to be in that area and gotten rid of them, and instead moved them into service industries like the ones I referenced above. Making things cheaper means more disposable income to be spent on luxury/nonessential items, which creates a market which didn't really exist, which in turn creates jobs. This is not hard stuff here.

Yes price reductions lead to new demand, hence new jobs.

But what if for almost every human supplied product/service there's a good enough machine substitue, or even just a human substitue that demands very little labor ? couldn't we reach a stable state of high unemployment ?

There are still a bunch of jobs where machines are unlikely to replace humans anytime soon or ever, because the cost of deploying machines everywhere and maintaining them will also reach a plateau. We may be good soon at making brains for machine but they still need mechanical parts and require maintenance. So they have a non negligible cost.

>You don't seem to realize that allowing labor to move from critical/essential work to nonessential work is a good thing. That's how the system is supposed to work. What would you call sommeliers, chefs who create Michelin-rated restaurants, movie stars/writers/producers, surfing instructors, etc if not nonessential?

I call them "creative professionals who do what they do by choice".

The majority of non essential work is not "movie stars and Michelin chefs", it's either automatable burger flipping or bureucratic busy-work created to overcome the lack of a system for distributing social wealth outside of "roll around for it".

To put it in another way, we could maintain our current production and give free massages and pedicures to everyone with far fewer jobs than we have now.

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