Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Well the current generation will suffer, but the next generation and future ones will benefit from self driving cars.

Who owns the future though?

While I am not a nationalist and I think it's commendable that the human race is making progress, I'm concerned that advances in technology are causing troubling concentrations of wealth among those who operate and control the technology.

luddites thought the same ;)

The luddite fallacy is in itself a fallacy as we are today not just talking about replacing physical labour with technology we are also replacing jobs that require mental abilities and at higher and higher levels of abstraction in an environment thats exponentially progressing.

The cold hard reality is that a lot of the jobs that's been created in the US are wallmart jobs or part time jobs and that the cost of living is going up.

So those who keep mentioning luddite fallacy owe it to explain what new jobs it is they see replacing the current jobs. Because if it's just a hope that it will be all right in the future some day it's not really an argument for anything.

Luddism was about a privileged caste defending their way of life. That has little to do with thinking about a post labor world and what happens to everyone who gets stranded outside the cash economy, never mind having any capital. If coders formed a guild and smashed automatic coding machines, now THAT would be more like Luddism.

What do you suggest though? Should we intentionally hold back technology so that factory workers and bus drivers have jobs? Especially as these automation schemes generally have the promise of drastically increased safety.

I agree it is a problem that people will be put out of work, but that is kind of an inevitability. Which is why a lot of people are arguing that basic income needs to be investigated much more closely.

Thomas Piketty has articulated a path forward. I support his view that governments ought to step in and institute a global tax on wealth.

Except that doesn't solve this problem (mostly: Read all the way through)

The issue isn't The Wealthy having all the money. The issue is technology that will actively remove jobs. It doesn't matter if minimum wage is 90 pounds an hour if you don't have a job. An automated train isn't The Wealthy stealing money. It is a conductor out of work because their job could be handled by a raspberry pi.

Basic Income is a theoretical concept (been implemented in small, borderline meaningless, experiments) to combat that. Everyone gets a bare minimum "salary" regardless of if they work. That covers cost of living (how much more varies). Then, those with jobs have the potential to earn a lot more (incentive to work) on top of that.

What Thomas Piketty proposes wouldn't address the lack of income to those put out of work by technology but could, possibly, help to pay for solutions that would.

I would say that the issue is The Wealthy having all the money.

Take it a few steps forward. At some point the factory owner (whether local or conglomerate) holds all the money and has 0 workers. The only thing he can buy is new resources to produce more stuff, but no one can buy that stuff because no one works anymore.

At some point it's just a machine making stuff that no one can afford to use other than the very few owning the machine.

Money is useless unless it's spread around and in rotation through the system. The unemployment of uneducated is the one thing I really sympethize with in this election, but the solution isn't going backwards, because there's nothing there anymore.

I understand that the solution isn't one step forward, but maybe 5, and people will suffer in the interim, but that only means it's ever more important to swiftly move in the right direction.

correct. If the only way to have money to spend is to work then if nobody works nobody can buy anything. UBI is one way to make people who don't necessarily work have money to spend. Taxing the wealthy is one way to fund UBI (the other is printing money, which is basically taxing savings indiscriminately by causing inflation). I honestly don't know if that would work on practice. But the point is that merely taxing the wealthy and do nothing to address the fact that people without jobs don't get money won't fix the problem of jobs disappearing. However there is a big social and psychology barrier that prevents giving money go those who "don't deserve it" by sweating for it. On of the big drawbacks in current welfare systems though is that whoever currently benefits from them has little incentive to work a little bit because they would get the same amount of money but they'll actually have to work. The only incentive is to get a job that would pay more than what you get from welfare and that creates a barrier and also reinforces the stereotype of some people just not be willing to work (e.g. because of laziness).

Well if that happens, then the population would shrink to accommodate (and it sort of is happening as people are having fewer children).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com