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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

Great post. I hope we get over the stigma of "destroying jobs" when it comes to ones like these that machines can easily do. Whenever I walk around the streets of New York I can't help but think about this. Be it the miserable cab drivers sitting in traffic staring at red lights their entire life; or guys hauling dusty insulation out of a demolition site and throwing it into the back of a truck while coughing up a fit; or delivery guys biking up and down the hostile avenues of manhattan in whatever weather to deliver Chinese food.

To me it will be a great tragedy if we never end up filling these necessary jobs with machines, be it for political reasons or something else. There's nothing stimulating or fulfilling about these jobs. It's first world human misery.

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> There's nothing stimulating or fulfilling about these jobs. It's first world human misery.

Tell that to the workers who actually depend on those jobs to live. It's easy to get rid of "unnecessary" jobs when they're not your job.

This is the stigma I'm talking about. My argument is that humanity in general needs to ascend and let machines take care of the dirty work. It's not a law of the universe that there must be people who depend on shitty jobs to live.

But I'm one of the crazies who believes that in an ideal world, there would be no 9-5 norm and it would be possible for people to spend most of their time with their family and taking care of their own physical and mental health, rather than sacrificing their waking hours to keep the unemployment rate down. These people are already acting as fleshy machines.

I'd like to live in the same world you describe. I work 9-5 and of course, I'd rather be doing whatever I please instead of going to work. But longing for the destruction of these jobs without a realistic alternative (e.g. basic income is still a pipe dream) is too near-sighted.

Sorry, I never meant to imply that I hope we do it hastily and without an alternative. It's an economic challenge for the ages, all I'm saying is it's worth taking on.

Strictly looking at everyone's selfish interests we will head to destruction of jobs which can be automated because it's the companies that decide which people to employ. If a law is passed that people must be employed, automation will happen elsewhere and companies from abroad will be more successful.

In other words, it's inevitable.

Problem is, there isn't a lot of pressure on the political forces to implement any sort of basic income, since there's still a high enough demand for meaningless human labor that it's easier to keep focussing on giving a job. Automation is potentially going to finally push us over the edge where trying to find menial jobs for every worker is no longer a tenable solution. With the current political climate, we won't ever get past it being a "pipe dream" without that being a the case, or at least it being a tangible threat in the near future.

>Problem is, there isn't a lot of pressure on the political forces to implement any sort of basic income

You mean a completely unproven system that most economists believe cannot possibly be funded without increasing spending to unheard of levels and no you don't save enough by cutting the "inefficiencies of the current system" and has a good chance to quickly die due to inflation?

Can we please stop bringing up UBI as a silver bullet to all problems in every automation article?

Especially since you can't solve supply-side problems by manipulating demand.

Universal Basic Income cannot meet the minimum survival needs of the population as long as it does nothing more than transfer money.

The vision most people have when thinking about UBI cannot be realized without some form of command economy separated from the profit-motivated consumer-goods pipeline. If all you do is give poor people cash, their landlords raise rents, their grocers raise prices, and their bus lines raise fares.

Any UBI that I'd actually expect to work is nowhere near as simple as just cutting checks.

> You mean a completely unproven system that most economists believe cannot possibly be funded without increasing spending to unheard of levels and no you don't save enough by cutting the "inefficiencies of the current system" and has a good chance to quickly die due to inflation?

I could have sworn I've heard that somewhere... oh wait, it's the same tired argument used against every progressive policy since the New Deal. You'll have to forgive UBI supporters for not taking economists seriously given their track record over the last century, during which the developed world increased spending to "unheard of" levels about a dozen times.

The US income tax, which required a Constitutional amendment, is only 104 years old after all.

> Can we please stop bringing up UBI as a silver bullet to all problems in every automation article?

I don't see anyone seriously claiming that UBI is a silver bullet, just that it's the only bullet we have left against our future robotic overlords.

> I'd rather be doing whatever I please instead of going to work

Not the same thing, the argument here is for more meaningful jobs, not just fewer bad jobs.

If there was less expectation of getting a bad job, there would be more support for getting good jobs.

The problem is, we can't ascend until we fix the underlying "if you're out of a job then you starve" problem - put UBI infrastructure in place, and then we can let the machines do the dirty work.

That's a pro not a con. If everyone was guaranteed food/shelter etc there'd be an epidemic of people who did nothing with their lives - there already are a lot of people who do nothing while working a shitty job.

Basic needs are motivation for doing things, but problematic too - they can also be demotivating.

The problem is that mobility & opportunity is costlier than food & shelter & small luxuries. As such, if you give people enough resources to do something with their life, they can just use it for basic needs & sls and do nothing else; why risk a comfy, if depressing, lifestyle on opportunity?

It's a difficult problem, how to ensure people always have opportunities available, while 'punishing' lack of ambition. Maybe the nuance here is the government becoming more aware of the impact of psychological factors, but this hasn't turned out well in the past...

Why do you care if other people are happy being unambitious? Most people aren't horribly ambitious. How are 7 billion people all supposed to change the world?

Ambitious doesn't mean trying to be president. It means doing more than eat, sleep, play xbox. Most people do more than that.

To me the problem here is the transition from Western capitalism to the [socialist] nirvana you describe.

It requires the rich and powerful to give up their lofty positions .

Not clearly socialist to me, But why do the rich and powerful need to give up wealth?

Because otherwise the dirty peasants will invent rationales for dragging them out into the streets and murdering them.

It isn't always easy to predict when it will happen, but horrifying, deplorable violence seems to be the only way for the lower classes to effectively reduce wealth inequality.

Some people are getting nervous enough to buy land in New Zealand or condo space in hardened apocalypse-survival bunkers. They know whose heads will roll if the guillotines ever get reassembled. They don't actually want to voluntarily give up their wealth, because they know how their peers treat those that don't have it, and because being constantly surrounded by luxuries is addictively awesome.

So we're frequently stuck in the situation where the poor think they're poor because the rich are too rich, and the rich don't care about what the poor think, because they're too busy kite-surfing in warm turquoise waters, buying recreational estates in Kauai, pitching giant museums to major cities, and generally living the good life.

The rich don't actually need to give up their wealth, but they might want to consider paying closer attention to the zeitgeist, and backing off on meddling too obviously in the lives of others at the appropriate times. Just like you might closely monitor the weather on your giant yacht, and make for port whenever a storm is brewing, you monitor the political climate and shelter your wealth when necessary.

Sounds like you should keeps your wealth and buy uzi-armed guards. Giving it away to peasants will allow them to buy uzis.

> There's nothing stimulating or fulfilling about these jobs. It's first world human misery.

That's really nice of you to make that determination for those miserables. They're probably so uneducated they don't even know how bad they have it. They are lucky that's people like you can come along to take away those horrible bill-paying, medicine buying, sources of personal satisfaction.

You could have made the same inane argument for all the uneducated factory laborers who have been replaced by machines. Nowhere did I suggest these people should be broke and without health care instead. And you can't argue with me that these people I mentioned genuinely, deep down, enjoy what they do for a living.

Why not? I worked on an electronics assembly line for a while doing electro-mechanical assembly. I enjoyed it and got satisfaction out of creating a physical product. It was kind of fun, not too stressful, sometimes monotonous, but also not too difficult. And after 8 hours I went home and didn't have to think about it until the next day.

I'm not saying that everyone enjoys that, or that we should keep those jobs around because I found it fun. But don't assume that just because a job seems menial to you that it must be horrible for everyone who's doing it.

Our life force diffuses over the options we perceive as viable and available. Many years from now, when we are all gone, kids will look back and wonder how humans could have ever been doing such jobs. Much in the same way we look back and find it hard to imagine how humans could spend the entire day chasing down prey and running from lions. It's that much of a leap that is required.

Much in the same way we look back and find it hard to imagine how humans could spend the entire day chasing down prey

Lots of humans today pay good money to get a chance to go out into the woods and spend an entire day chasing down prey.

For entertainment. Not because they'd die if they didn't.

Sure. But I also know people who still romanticize the whole hunter-gatherer lifestyle and wish they could live that life (whether or not they'd actually want to keep living that life after first month is of course an open question).

Who knows, in a couple of hundred years we might have people romanticizing spending all day in a cubicle working at a mid-sized accounting firm :)

>You could have made the same inane argument for all the uneducated factory laborers who have been replaced by machines.

There's nothing inane about the argument. Have you ever been to Detroit? I've lived there for years. It's a horrible thing for these people to have been replaced by automation in their lifetimes. They didn't see the benefits in the increased productivity like their employers did, they just lost their livelihood and had to scramble for jobs that paid much less while simultaneously trying to retrain into other fields, if they were enterprising. The entire region is obviously devastated from the effects of it. Their prior automated work being "unfulfilling" and therefore terrible is a) debatable and b) nothing compared to the struggle of having no income at all. One guy I knew ended up homeless after he lost his job, then with a leg amputation because of frostbite from sleeping outside. When I met him he was making a living ticket scalping in his wheelchair all day. The short term consequences are real and terrible for these people.

That is horrible, and I understand that it's a big socioeconomic challenge. I don't claim to know the answer, but I hope we find it as a species.

Doesn't this just outline the terrible dependence these workers had on their jobs? No compensation of duty of care exists from employers; any number of things could have caused the workers to lose their jobs, they were always at risk even when not struggling.

as an analogy: Crack addicts going through withdrawal don't conclude from their pain that the drugs were a good thing. OP wasn't suggesting workers should suddenly have their jobs taken away, but that the whole situation is bad. Changing the situation, and how to do it, is an entirely different topic.

Is this sarcasm of some kind or a legitimate point you're trying to make?

>Doesn't this just outline the terrible dependence these workers had on their jobs?

You're effectively saying people shouldn't rely on their jobs to support their livelihood. What other option do they (rather, we) have? Maybe factory workers should have had the foresight to see the industry changing toward automation, but even if they did, then what? Keep working to support your family 40 or more hours per week but learn an entirely new craft on top of that? Does that actually seem reasonable?

>any number of things could have caused the workers to lose their jobs, they were always at risk even when not struggling.

Yes, but the industry still existed. Say you worked for 10 years at Ford and got fired. Maybe GM or Chrysler has an opportunity for you, and they'd probably love your experience.

Does that sound familiar at all? Say you work for 10 years at Google and get fired. Maybe Facebook or Amazon has an opportunity for you, and they'd probably love your experience.

My point is that putting the blame on the employee shows a complete lack of empathy for someone because they "chose the wrong path in life". Does the employer have a duty to support the individual who became obsolete? No, but we should all collectively have a duty to make sure the lives of these people aren't completely destroyed, because as unlikely as it seems right now for those of us in the software world (and I'm sure it seemed unlikely in 1995 for those in the auto industry), we very well may be next.

> What other option do they (rather, we) have?

Better jobs. What options do a crack addict have? Very few. That doesn't mean they are better off now being deprived off it, they would be better off never being dependent.

> Keep working to support your family

Why did they have a family when they were at risk? Either didn't perceive the risk, they operated under a false sense of security; or no other options were offered because the jobs that existed were seem as suitable.

If there were no jobs they wouldn't be inclined to settle down. I note that turning down a job can be grounds for losing some welfare benefits.

> Maybe GM or Chrysler has an opportunity for you

speculative. In the context we are talking about there are dangerous correlations: If one worker loses their jobs, the chance that another will increase (due to the possibility of a common cause, in this case automation), not to mention the chance of greater competition from other out-of-work workers (or lower compensation).

> Maybe Facebook or Amazon

Are you still talking about bad jobs? I'd love programming/tech to be more automated, somehow.

> putting the blame on the employee shows a complete lack of empathy for someone because they "chose the wrong path in life"

that's your strawman,not my argument.

> Does the employer have a duty to support the individual who became obsolete?

Do you mean at current, legally? No.

legally or morally, in the future? yes, maybe, who knows. Corporate tax pays for some social welfare. Things won't change if you're not allowed to criticise the current system.

> we should all collectively have a duty to make sure the lives of these people aren't completely destroyed

I disagree, this isn't enough. We have a duty to make sure the lives are full of this kind of risk too, "completely destroyed" is too low a bar.

> the lives are full of this kind of risk

should be:

"their lives aren't full of this kind of risk"

Having worked retail and customer service jobs firsthand, and having friends (and obviously coworkers) that have as well, I'd assure you that the statement you quoted is accurate for the majority of those workers. Most people leave for any other job the moment they can, and those who can't get old and bitter.

<There's nothing stimulating or fulfilling about these jobs

I object. I can't tell what someone else feels is satisfying and I believe you can't either.

Have experiences and relationships with all types of people and jobs. I have and agree with Mike Rowe. The happiest group of people he ever worked with were those he filmed and performed dirty jobs with.

After freeing myself from the stigma of a professional job I gained more happiness with much less responsibility and much more free time. Like those jobs you mentioned. If I had known that when I was on call awaiting for the next system to crash only to get interrupted time and time again I would have intentionally changed careers faster.

> or guys hauling dusty insulation out of a demolition site and throwing it into the back of a truck while coughing up a fit

Those guys/gals may actually enjoy manual labor - some people just can stand the thought of being cooped up behind a desk in a stuffy office (or at least that's how they may envision it).

Though I will say that anyone dealing with insulation - especially in a place like NYC - who doesn't wear a minimum of safety equipment (goggles, gloves, respirator or dust mask) is just begging for asbestos-related health problems down the road (heck, even regular insulation can cause respiratory health problems over time).

A few years ago, I worked at a California university where 5 people manually keyed in all transactions for the day. Something an export from the bank could do in minutes.

I cannot fathom at all why anyone, other than top 10% or so whose wealth depends on everyone else's labor, is fighting automation. Or wants to keep a job. I would gladly let machines do the work so I can play fetch with my dog all day.

Instead of converting productivity into less work we turned it into more profit. That's a bad trade.

When the machine does your work, and the bosses keep your wage for themselves. What are you going to eat, or indeed feed your dog, how well you past for it without a wage?

Why wouldn't playing fetch with his (and other people's dogs) not become a perfectly viable job in a world where consumer goods are dirt cheap and human labor relatively scarcer?

Why would labor be cheap?

I don't know. The premise was precisely that labor would become more expensive.

The idea is that if we can automate "everything" (i.e. everything that can be automated), then we'll be left with human-only services. Since humans are scarce, and there will be rising demand from the income effect, people can still perfectly live off exchanging services.

I'm not sure that makes macroeconomic sense, so if someone wants to clarify misunderstandings for me, I'd be happy to hear it.

Well, what makes you think that humans are scarce? Unemployment is a thing already. For example, you can take a look at what e.g. waiters or Walmart greeters earn right now - that's a price set by supply&demand. Automation moving more people to such jobs means the supply of labor would increase, driving down the price for services.

Assuming the jobless people will have less income than if they worked, and more time to do stuff themselves (some of the services industry is essentially something that you'd prefer to make yourself but you're paying to save yourself some time) demand for service jobs would decrease, again driving down the price for services lower than it is now.

> Automation moving more people to such jobs

I don't think the set of possible jobs is limited to either existing jobs, or in particular waiters and Walmart greeters. That's kind of the point. We invent new jobs all the time. Won't we come up with jobs that cannot be automated, or that we'd rather be performed by humans?

> Assuming the jobless people will have less income than if they worked

Well, that's more of a tautology than an assumption, and fails to engage with the scenario highlighted above. The point is that people will get other "jobs." (I put it in quotation marks because I'm pretty sure that people will get paid to do things we'd never thought of as "jobs" at some point).

Of course, S&D still works the same way. But human desire is pretty much infinite, and we can always come up with new jobs and new markets. The idea that all of them will be desirably automateable seems unproven to me.

What's preventing those new jobs from being done right now? We already have all these unlimited needs and infinite desires right now, but we aren't willing to pay a minimum wage for them at the moment or we would be doing so. Also, there clearly are all kinds of personal services possible which are bought by a few of the rich but not en masse - there is not a demand for them, and for the average person probably cannot be, i.e. if a service is nice but people would value 1 man-hour spent on it as 0.99 man-hours of their time, then that service can ever be in demand only for a wealthier-than-average minority.

Yes, it's possible that some new habits will create some new professions in time, however, for the short term (e.g. the next 5 years) such new occupations won't create millions of jobs (e.g. because unless right now millions of people would be preparing for them, the people won't be ready so soon) while automation will put millions of people out of these jobs. Who knows to what equilibrium it will come out eventually, but in the short term the labor supply will be dominating over demand and the price (and perceived value) of labor will continue to fall.

> Since humans are scarce, and there will be rising demand

Seems to me that humans will be in surplus? It depends on what price must be payed for the automated things, which I assume won't be free?

Not free, but presumably much cheaper than they are currently.

Main issue are the laws wrt land ownership etc, e.g. the old "means of production".

Except I don't consider the products that allow production (factory, machines etc) to be the means, so much as access to those products on the market, lines of credit, land ownership on which to put a factory etc.

production needs to be achievable for anyone, otherwise you have an effective monopoly. Means of production should be considered akin to a basic utility.

quote my self since you didn't see it.

> Instead of converting productivity into less work we turned it into more profit. That's a bad trade.

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