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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

Most individuals care less about jobs in aggregate and just care about their own particular job. They especially don't care about the number of jobs at the global level. There are many people whose job will be replaced by robots and whatever expertise they've learned over the years will become useless. They will need to transition to an entirely new career and start over. If they are over the age of 40 they have to also fight ageism and the fact that their future work output potential is more limited to an employer's eyes.

This whole idea that we don't have to worry because automation creates new jobs seems totally ignorant of this reality (and the political consequences).

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Absolutely agreed. I think the GP's viewpoint was widely shared by "The Elite" for the past 10 years and is what created the backlash that got Trump elected. We (and I use that loosely) have to care because the people who get displaced all care about their jobs. In fact, because this displacement is accelerating, we have to care even more than we would in the past.

>I think the GP's viewpoint was widely shared by "The Elite" for the past 10 years and is what created the backlash that got Trump elected.

Why do you think that? If by backlash you mean people (Trump voters) wanting social support to deal with those problems, I see zero evidence of that. The extreme anti-immigration views indicate that the opposite is true and Trump voters think people are taking advantage of social programs. When Trump talks about bringing back jobs, its purely out of xenophobia and is completely divorced from actually employing people. It's not about hiring Americans and it never was; its about not employing foreigners.

It seems to me that now more than ever the only people who care about automation affecting jobs are the ones less likely to be affected.

I think there is evidence that it put Trump barely over the top in critical midwestern states.

What was huge, was the perception that trade, specifically NAFTA, China, and TPP cause people to lose their jobs. The perception that the elite, and Hilary Clinton, supported those things, even when sometimes they said they didn't is what caused the backlash.

"was widely shared by "The Elite" for the past 10"

You mean for the last 200 years.

Mass automation has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

As long as there is value to be created, and the surpluses are distributed enough so that consumers 'want something and can pay for it' - there will be jobs.

Obviously, it's more painful for those put out of work than 'the elite' ... but employment levels have been decent for a very long time. [1]

The historical unemployment rate seems to defy the notion that 'machines are putting everyone out of work'. That can't be ignored; in fact, it demands kind of another way of looking at it.

[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-r...

The long history of scarcity amid plenty does deserve examination. Critical examination.

How messed up is it that people not only have to beg for the privilege of work, but that they are seen as selfish, thankless, and incompetent for doing so?

Once humanity gets this sorted out -- and it will, eventually -- the present state of affairs will be looked at with the same contempt that people in today's world have for feudalism. It will deserve every bit of it.

Could you explain a little more explicitly what you are referring to, and what you think the solution will be?

I think you might be projecting your own beliefs onto Trump's election here. If what you're saying is true then we would expect income to be a good predictor of voting for Trump right? It wasn't [0]. Trump's election was backlash, but not to loss of jobs. It was a backlash against much more than that?

Did you feel that loss of jobs to technology was a problem before Trump? If so it seems very convenient to believe that the election of a candidate that I'm assuming you hate, was due to a situation which you already hated. I'd encourage you to look a little more deeply at what caused people to vote for Trump.

[0] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre...

"we would expect income to be a good predictor of voting for Trump right? It wasn't [0]"

The figures in that article are all aggregates (at county level) and say nothing about whether an individual's income level correlates with voting for Trump.

Imagine a scenario in which there are two types of county:

- Type A: High median income; high income inequality (as measured by Gini coefficient)

- Type B: Low median income; low income inequality

If there are more Trump supporters in A than B, does that suggest that low income doesn't encourage voting for Trump? Not necessarily: perhaps low income relative to neighbours or living costs encourages voting for Trump.

I'm not saying income isn't a good predictor for voting for Trump. However, I'm not sure the post you cited demonstrates that either way.

> I think the GP's viewpoint was widely shared by "The Elite" for the past 10 years and is what created the backlash that got Trump elected.

The Democrats essentially abandoning labor with the neoliberal "Third Way" politics of Bill Clinton certainly was a factor in setting the stage for a right-wing authoritarian populist like Trump, but ascribing Trump's election to any one factor is overly simplistic.

Agreed, the jobs are moving to new places and skillsets, but many US voting demographics aren't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

In many cases abroad.

Apple (among other tech companies) indirectly created 1.3 million jobs at Foxconn in China, for instance.

Most economic models (including the Ball State U "study" by Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA) that counted "jobs lost to robots" define productivity as GDP/number of employees employed in America. This indicates upon shallow inspection that Apple, for instance, has a very high productivity (high contribution to GDP/employees).

Or, in other words, economists' models used to declare an impending magic robot revolution right now are defining the 1.2 million Foxconn employees used to make iPhones as robots in their assumptions.

Foxconn itself regularly threatens to replace its 1.2 million employees with magic robots. For instance, see this threat from 2011 made at an employee dance party for some bizarre reason:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...

Since then they increased their headcount implying that the threat was made for some other reason than it being say, the truth.

So the magic robot scenario is more expensive to implement than the Foxconn workforce, but if we were to implement more protectionist policies though that made manufacture in china untenable, would the magic robots still be more expensive than American labour?

Edit: Also, maybe Foxconn was on track to grow by even more, but used robots instead. It's not necessarily the case that greater automation isn't coming or that more people will always be hired; they seem to be holding their breath for the moment that robots can replace all the people and actively investing in the area in the meantime [1]

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966

So... "magic robots aren't real but just you wait they soon WILL be if you take away my dirt cheap labor" theory?

>Edit: Also, maybe Foxconn was on track to grow by even more, but used robots instead.

Indeed. I eagerly await Foxconn's one million magic robots promised in 2009, 2011, 2014, 2015 and again in 2016.

There are also people who are over the age of 40 and already don't have jobs, or never had jobs. Some of them might get jobs created by tech. Are they in some way less deserving? Do people who once had a job have a god given right to keep it? I don't think so but maybe you disagree. Either way, let's dispense with this idea that we only care about jobs at an individual level, clearly this is a discussion about jobs in aggregate. I don't think either one of us is talking about our own personal jobs right now.

Economic transitions are always painful, but economic stasis is also painful. Pick your poison, that's why it's called the dismal science.

Finally, as I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread I think you're several miss-attributing recent political "consequences" if you think they're due to automation of jobs.

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