To improve the efficiency of a particular group, we create problems elsewhere. The result may not be net positive. In fact, I think it isn't, since those saved "couple of minutes" will probably be spent browsing Facebook.
- that automating all jobs will cause all prices to go down. (It seems just as plausible that if everything were automated, then the relatively small class of people who work building and maintaining the machines wield monopoly-like power and charge accordingly, concentrating wealth even more than it's concentrated today.)
- that with lower prices, people will want less money. (It seems just as plausible that people will expect to be able to keep working and buy more to raise their standard of living.)
- that the intermediate state, where many jobs are automated, but people still need to work for a living, is tenable for society
- that there are no significant social problems resulting from a society where nobody has to work
I don't know whether these are true or not, but if they're not, the result will greatly impact the lives of millions (billions?) of people. Obviously, banning automation isn't a solution either, but it seems flippant to bet the lives of so many people on what we think might happen in a system as complex as the global economy.
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The problem is assuming that total wealth means anything for anyone but the capitalist class that owns said wealth.
Instead, those with the means of production have hoarded the benefits. Despite all of our technological progress after the American industrial revolution, we are working more hours and earning less as a whole. Despite record profits, companies are not increasing wages and prices are not decreasing for anything except cheap, low-quality, mass-market consumer goods.
See: trickle down economics.
And, behold, we see someone rediscovering the central tenet of Marxist economic theory.
(Entirely serious; not an insult. HN readers could really do with a more balanced economic diet – reading more Marxist theory and less Chicago School...)
(This is why I've read a solid chunk of the Austrians. I generally laugh at them. But I've read their stuff and I can think in it once I get into the mindset.)
I'm promptly shutting up about anything for which the valid answer isn't "Lisp does it better". ;).
Yes! It's a useful lens – just as Hayek is. No-one has a monopoly on absolute truth in the social sciences, so understanding (and empathizing with) all the framing narratives, most all of which have some kind of a point, is crucial to being able to navigate these kinds of discussion.)
Understanding Marxist (and Hayekian) thought has been very helpful to me in framing my own politics – which, ironically enough, wind up being moderate market/social liberalism in the European tradition.
To this day I'm so thankful that I got a B.A. that let me actually leave the CS cage during college instead of just taking more math.
That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. But man, we have to try! Forcing people to do things a machine can do is inhumane.
The job-saving technology will live forever, long after the people who are temporarily displaced die. You're doing an immense amount of good for the untold number of people who aren't even born yet.
Technology is also global, but the political problems associated with eliminating jobs are problems on a state-by-state basis. Is it immoral to develop a technology just because some political systems are incapable of handling the gains in productivity, while other states are?
If that notion is correct, moving towards an educational model focused around creating the components needed for general entertainment (video/AR/VR/Music etc) might alleviate the problems we'll face.
Where are these people getting the money to spend on entertainment if they aren't working? I don't think this will happen.
What I do see happening, however, is that people have less free time between juggling more than 1 job and a side gig with Uber/their ilk.
I grew up in a country (Finland) where people bag their own groceries. The table behind the cashier just has a bit more room and some dividers, so even 3 customers have room to bag their own groceries simultaneously.
So an utopia without the "grocery-bagging class" is certainly possible.
So what is new? We have been automating jobs out of existence for a long time. Every era has had a lot of people that are redundant, every era has had useless governments get to grips with it.
Recently I automated three jobs out of existence, making the computer do the data entry work with the customer filling in forms. This is great for the customer as they now get what they want done instantly instead of having to wait a week for the human to do what the computer can do. It is great for the company as 3 people don't have to be managed, provided office space and paid. But as for my colleagues?
I obviously have had thoughts about automating my friends on the next desk out of existence, how I see it is that there are actually plenty of vacancies in the company, there are plenty of vacancies outside the company and the writing has been on the wall for the last year regarding the changes we put through. 2 of my 3 former colleagues are now working elsewhere, having moved on fine, but there is the one that did not step up and go for other interviews within the company or look elsewhere. Now I am sure that government handouts are available, however, if someone does not look out for their own job and assumes it will always be there for them, what can you do? Is it always the government's fault in this situation?
My above sentiment is a tad Thatcherite, it was Norman Tebbit who said 'on your bike', i.e. if there isn't a job for you in your home town then you have got to move, the government isn't going to magically create a job for you. The 'on your bike' remark didn't go down too well in the 1980's, but 'on your bike' it has been since then.
There comes a point where flexibility and gumption don't get you far enough. When the pool of good quality jobs shrinks so much that the ecosystem cannot support the species.
I'm not calling for a halt to progress. If you hadn't automated away those jobs someone else would have. There are very strong economic incentives to do so. I just wish governments would see the writing on the wall and start planning for the future where the status quo leaves most people out in the cold.
In practice what [is and] is going to happen is that the jobs of the poor are removed, because they are more easily automated and the capitalists will retain much of the revenue that would formerly have been spent on wages.
Nothing is going to be done politically until there is either civil unrest or until there is so much impact to those with lowest wealth in society that the capitalists start getting poorer returns because too few people can afford to purchase the goods produced. In either case the situation is going to be very dire IMO before we get there.
This on top of the apparent existing inequalities and the increasing pay gap that the gig economy is creating (the efficiencies don't appear to be improving pay for the workers nor reducing costs as much as they could), and things like zero-hours contracts are pushing [in the UK] makes for a bleak outlook for those who are not already rich IMO.
The problem is the civil unrest seems to be moving in the direction of ethnic nationalism and isolationism, which may not turn out to be the best long term solution to this problem.
But how can we be sure that enough meaningful jobs will exist for all people who want to work? It would be kind of surprising if there was a meaningful full job for everyone.
This feels like former communist countries where everyone was employed, although many jobs were pointless.
It's not clear there's anything a person can do that a machine can never do, in principle.
So then what's the point of having people?
A): None (catastrophic). People die out, or are wiped out, as advanced machines outcompete them for all resources.
B): The boundary (hopeful). AI capable of creating new ideas is either impossible or just too difficult to invent (hard to prove which way it goes), so people keep pushing it farther.
C): None (utopic). Machines do anything people would have done for society, including the creation of new things to have and/or do. However, machines don't reach the level of autonomy required for them to actively eliminate people, or decide against it because there's plenty of resources for everyone, so people have 100% leisure time (which may happen to resemble what used to be work, if the people in question enjoy the process, but is no longer necessary to society).
D): The boundary (dystopic). Machines end up being more complex than people - to the degree that people are valued less than sufficiently advanced machines, and are put to work rather than manufacturing robots to do the jobs.
A note on D: Generally relatively soft sci-fi that does this, because the stories generally put humanity's role as hard labor, which doesn't make sense. However, I could see a story in "The Thinking Machine of the Future has become so Incredibly Advanced that the Absolute Pinnacle of Human Thought is to them what Plowing Fields is to Us." Humanity as the intellectual equivalent of the plow ox (or the tractor), doing the jobs that the machines (with their much higher potential for more complex thought) find to be beneath them and refuse to subject each other to. Possibly with the assistance of basic nonintelligent machines, the way we wouldn't try to make an ox plow a field without first affixing a plow to it.
But we're far from that point now. Anything machines can currently do is, pretty much by definition, drudgery. I'd be happy to reevaluate that statement if and when this changes.
I have no idea what the ultimate answer to that question would be. Lots of SF authors have tried to address it, coming up with answers varying from humans always having something they can do better, to humans existing to have fun, to humans having no point at all and therefore get wiped out by the machines.
Now they're just plain out of work. Hooray?
It's utopian to think job losses mean everybody gets their workload reduced, as this has never happened before. Automation has never reduced anybody's workloads. In fact, every reduction has happened to either eliminate de-facto slaves (industrial revolution) or because excessive workloads actually reduce productivity.
If we have the technology to replace those people and we don't do it, then we as a society are already supporting them just to survive. You're talking about artificially maintaining inefficiency. If we're going to go down that road, we might as well start paying people to dig holes and fill them back up again.
The 40 hour workweek is significantly shorter than the 6 12 hour work days people used to endure.
Why not reduce the workweek again, to say, 32 hours?
It's not a 'natural' evolution, but organized fight from labour.
The same with the general conditions of work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_and_Collieries_Act_1842
So, in my opinion, reducing the workweek or, an alternative that I think is more practical, stop working younger it's against powerful interests and can't be done without a fight.
The transition will be difficult (they usually are) but the end result (more free time for everyone) sounds good to me.
Honestly, I think this is never going to actually be the case. Why would a grocery store lower prices just because their costs went down a bit? Neither the demand nor the supply has changed, nor has the price people are willing to pay for their groceries.
If nothing has changed but your costs, why lower the prices when you can simply report increased revenue to your shareholders? If competition comes along, a quick "we're premium, they are cheap" marketing campaign (or buying them out) would probably cost less than lowering the prices to match.
I think it's fair to say that even if Walmart could half their operating costs with technology, those savings would not find their way into the pockets of consumers.
It can, that's clear, the problem is convincing the people who didn't lose their jobs that they should take a take hike to support the others; that's not an easy sell in Western Capitalism at least.
Fallacy; apart from a short break thanks to syndicalist wins, we're just working more and more since the industrial revolution.
Reading suggestions: "A People's History Of The United States" by Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.
unlikely - can think of a bunch of reasons why this wouldn't happen.
> people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education
too idealistic - why aren't the people who "aren't working full weeks" today focusing on learning and reaching higher education? The logic doesn't work for the people already in this target group, today.
There are many reasons. "Not working full weeks" doesn't always mean "not busy". Some of the reasons are:
- they're taking care of children / sick parents
- they're themselves sick or disabled (including various psychological conditions that can make you unable to perform effectively as a worker in this economy)
- they don't have a way to find a job that would let them earn more than they get from benefits (going to work in such circumstances is stupidity from economic POV)
- higher education they need costs money they can't get due to reasons listed above
I'm specifically asking about the assumption that "if we remove cashiers, supermarkets will obviously bring the prices down" (as a counter-example, I remember reading somewhere that Seattle's minimum wage didn't affect inflation in any meaningful way)
This feels like a natural evolution. It's a outcome product of the environment.
However "I am unsure we are evolving" sounds like paradox. Isn't a version 2 of anything always "evolving" by definition? Otherwise, what's "better"?