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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, fellow hackers: what is going to happen to the millions upon millions who will be automated out of the only jobs they are capable of doing?

Eventually there will be no need for truck drivers, fast food employees, even housekeeping is becoming more and more automated. How will people find work if a machine can always do it better? How will the less-intelligent find work if all the jobs require education they cannot or will not strive for? What happens to them? What happens to their children? How many people around the world are we willing to support without their working? 100 million? 1 billion? Several billion?

This is a serious and terrifying question. Automation is eating jobs so quickly I don't have any idea what the labor landscape will look like in ten years.

What happens to these people? Who lives? Who eats? Who gets medical attention?

Who pays?

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Not a difficult question to answer. Look around you to other countries and situations to understand what happens when jobs disappear.

You either run a welfare state model (Scandinavia, Switzerland) where you guarantee everyone a comfortable minimum lifestyle and support or you implode in civil war that removes the ruling class (Arab Spring nations)

Considering the fact that the "welfare state model" is Socialism, I'm guessing here in the US we're going to go with the second option eventually.

Socialism does not necessarily mean welfare state or vice versa, unless you strictly define socialism as being any government service offered that could potentially be offered by a private firm.

We are socialists as long as we use tax dollars to pay for public police officers and firefighters.

Is it still technically socialism if the public servants answer only to the ruling class, and are almost completely unaccountable to anyone else?

We have already been through this transition before. Two hundred years ago, 90% of the population worked in agriculture. Now only a few percent do. The rest didn't end up unemployed, we invented entirely new industries to meet demands that didn't even exist before.

But I do agree that the speed of the change this time makes the transition period far more dangerous. I think the biggest hurdle is that culture itself will need to change. People have been taught to judge their own worth based on how hard they work. That makes this transition an identity threat, which is even worse than an economic one.

If we can get through the transition period without a horrible war, I am highly confident we will see an economy that's as much beyond ours as ours is beyond 1817. It's very hard to say it will look like (any more than farmers in 1817 could have predicted how I make my living writing software). But as long as there are unmet needs and desires, there is work to be done. And as long as some things are scarce (attention and social prestige seem fundamentally scarce), there will be economies.

Another way to put it is: if most people can access the output of the robot factories, then they won't be poor. If most people can't access the output of the robot factories, then they constitute a big market and there will be plenty of jobs serving each other.

I disagree with your assessment that this is simply a new industrial revolution following the same path as the old.

Farming is hard work but is not necessarily difficult or hard to learn. Same with assembly line factory work.

But when college graduates are put out of the job by neural networks that can analyze information better and faster than the ugly bags of mostly water ever could, what do they do? Where do they work? What kinds of jobs will they have?

And if they cannot find work, what happens to the the income of their hairdresser? Their grocery store clerk? Their barista?

What if they can't find jobs either? What do they do?

ML is fundamentally different from any technological revolution that has come before. Humans have a long history of automating brawn, but not brain.

I refuse to accept hand-waving that things will simply change and be ok as they were before. Machine learning will be the biggest reckoning in the history of humanity even without full-blown artificial intelligence. And nobody knows how it will play out.

> neural networks that can analyze information better and faster than the ugly bags of mostly water ever could

As soon as the above is the case, why should the ugly bags of mostly-water exist anymore?

Because life is more than work. Maybe if we're lucky, we can figure that out in time for the machines to learn from us.

That transition was FAR different than the one we're faced with in the near future. People moved from agriculture to factory jobs, because there was still a massive need for labor. We don't have that today. Someone being displaced as a semi driver isn't going to suddenly hop into an AI startup.

So back to the question: What does that person do? How do they feed and house their family?

People who were displaced out of agriculture didn't necessarily go get factory jobs either. The industrial revolution was massively disruptive socially, and a lot of people didn't come through fine. A lot of them drank themselves to death, much like the opioid crisis today. It was their children who adapted to a new economy.

> So back to the question: What does that person do? How do they feed and house their family?

We need to build the political will to take care of them through guaranteed basic income or equivalent. And even if we do some of them will still drink themselves to death anyway, because they see welfare as shameful.

And the life expectancy of a factory worker was insane. Cities were in a constant population decline, only propped up by people in the country having to find work.

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