Robots Aren’t Destroying Enough Jobs | Hacker News Reader

Robots Aren’t Destroying Enough Jobs

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15 pointsprostoalex10 comments

This post is very strange to me. It talks about our 3% increase in wages like it's an incredibly bad sign of instability in our economy, yet ignores the fact that wages have been stagnant for decades now. I also wonder if those wage increases went to the upper class, or lower?

I'd argue that this shift in worker/employer leverage balance is long overdue, and focusing on improving the gross inequality between the classes should be more important than having our economy continue some sort of exponential growth. We are currently living the future, it's just not distributed evenly.

I think the fetish for GDP and how PPP are calculated [+] mask some actual growth. The number of hours you have to work to buy a meal, pay rent, buy a TV, etc have plummeted, not to mention there was no consumer Internet in the 1990s, much less Netflix (going to the movies was a big production, especially if you didn't live in a big city). IMHO when looked at that way wages have risen.

This is essentially a corollary of Baumol, though he didn't write about it.

[+] Like the Dow, the value they bring is a little bit of temporal comparison capability. But they were designed to give a back-of-the-envelope view that could be calculated by pencil and paper. But people mistake the map for the landscape...

why can't pundits stop saying "destroy jobs" and start saying "liberate humans"? why are supposedly intellectual people just unable to see the slavery and imagine utopia where every stupid job nobody wants to do anyway is automated? where people are not so much running in circles for gains of their capitalistic overlord? it's all just everyday shitchattheory and donttouchtheholygrailofjobs gospel. bores me.

Because a technology which competes with and reduces market clearing quantity of human labor does not, in a basically capitalist economy, liberate humans, except those already situated as capitalists, who are “liberated” from paying wages.

For those who don't have huge capital stocks and thus have little but wage labor to turn to earn a living, technology that competes with labor deepens their economic subjugation rather than effecting liberation.

Now, obviously, getting farther away from capitalism in the economic structure may change this, but that isn't an automatic consequence of the technology.

I think the perspective you're applying here is an important one.

That said, if we imagine that there is productive marginal work to be done, then replacing drudgery with automation frees up the money being spent there to be spent elsewhere, and presumably increases demand for the better work.

Obviously there are some assumptions, and "liberation" may still be hyperbole, but it doesn't necessarily benefit only the capitalists.

It would be all well and good if either better jobs came to replace he drudgery of old (honestly, worked in light industrial and plastics so I can't imagine anyone doing the work if they could get a better paying job with fewer hours) or that the over all price of goods dropped to reflect the actual material intensity of production. But neither has occurred, especially in former industrial centers in the US. Until that happens the benefit of automation will always go to those who own the majority of the companies in question. Which is why I think they either need to be taxed or their means of production held in common ownership by the state.

Taking this a step further we see the growth in completely meaningless jobs. For example, low power administrative jobs, that are impossible to automate.

10 years ago I already thought that 1/3 jobs were already meaningless. So much people are in "piloting/supervising" jobs that has little added value. Jobs, themselves are more and more "activities".

In addition people are fighting back, they use low technology or pretend that something that is already automatized does not work:

Every time I rent a car on the Web, when I go picking it at the local agency, they ask me every details that they record again and again on their computer.

When I did work, every manager asked us to use both the Intranet and a spreadsheet on the local file server to record our activity.

Once the HR director who should have know how many people were on the payroll, went at every team with his computer, to record how many people there were in each team, how many time they did work per week, etc...

And you're probably right. But the thing is that some jobs weren't meaningless, for example, before automated agriculture people had to actually grow their own food. Assembly lines needed people to do the jobs that machines couldn't. But today we increasingly moved to meaningless jobs and there is little room to automate them. Kinda like Amdahl's law.

"Unknown item in the bagging area."

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