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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

The fact that nobody was laid off does not mean that no jobs were lost. If efficiency increased, and nobody was laid off, what does that mean? More product/service was produced. That marginal additional product/service would have required more workers, had they not had this efficiency gain from automation, and I think it's only fair to consider those jobs to be 'lost'.

That being said, I think this is all wonderful, in spite of the misleading framing.

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> I think it's only fair to consider those jobs to be 'lost'.

Is that like someone losing a child because they decided never to have any?

It's like a recording studio claiming they lost sales because people downloaded the album they produced.

Or like complaining that physical media is crashing and burning while paid digital media is exploding.

I'd say it's more like declining birth rates in wealthy countries due to the collective decision to have fewer children. From the perspective of social accounting and governance, it doesn't matter why we aren't having fewer children, simply that we are. The same with jobs.

Losing jobs due to lack of job growth concomitant with GDP growth (as is the case here - i.e. more efficiency, same job count) creates more inequality - a larger share of the value produced flows to capital. Depending on your politics, this is either a bad thing, or just a benign fact. But it is definitely a thing.

I don't think that's an apt comparison. Generally the assumption is that when the economy grows, the amount of jobs/employment rate grows. This scenario runs counter to that assumption.

I think it's more like opening a new McDonalds down the street, but it's automated so you don't need a bunch of minimum wage workers to staff it. Or in Amazon's case, maybe more like doubling the size of a warehouse without doubling the staff.

If u ever been to a warehouse there are plenty of jobs nobody here on HN wants, they are mindless and joyless labor and often time temporary. Should we really mourn over the jobs that consume people and treat them like drones? The survived workers are indeed better off doing something that suits their long term interests.

Lots of people want to be drones so that they can feed their families. Ideally, they could feed their families without being drones, but your saying that they should be glad to lose their drone jobs without gaining a different means of support is simply cruel.

Isn't it equally cruel to talk like people want to be drones?

Nobody want to be drones. They are forced into being drones.

Simply keeping those jobs around, merely as an exchange of blood labor for basic living support, is not a mercy to the people you are trying to help. No, it is slaver's talk. It signals a greater failure of the social security network, or the dysfunction of redistribution of wealth to benefit the general public, that people cannot keep basic living standard without such compromise.

> Isn't it equally cruel to talk like people want to be drones?

Well, I didn't append all the qualifiers I could have because I assumed that my comment would be read in a reasonable way.

Right now, those drone jobs are the difference between eating and not eating for a lot of people. I obviously want to see the eating problem solved before the drone job problem is solved. Until then, saying that these people should be happy to lose their drone jobs is cruel. I encourage you to go present your theory to some of those drones. Tell them about how they can cast off the chains of their slavery and be free to starve.

Talk about failures of the social safety net is nice (and I agree, as far as that goes), but it's just talk. Talk is not going to fix the social safety net. These are real lives that depend on this issue.

Difference is, in this case, nobody loses their jobs and no one is starving. What you are saying, is the loss of future drone jobs. Should it be that case, we should never automate agriculture ever, since it had been the major sector of employment for many many centuries.

I think in this article's case, it is good automation, not the aggressive kind, so I want to know why people would lament over the loss of the those non-existed shitty jobs.

First of all, the "no layoffs" claim can easily be achieved through attrition, as covered elsewhere in this thread. That means that someone would have been hired to replace a departing worker but now isn't getting that job.

Second, even aside from attrition, there are absolutely people who would have wanted the jobs that the robots are doing. Some of those people would have wanted those jobs because it would have been their only option. I would rather they had other options (via a social safety net, presumably), but that's not the world we live in right now.

At this point, I suspect you are intentionally reading me in the worst sense you can manage. I think I have adequately explained my position, and if you really want to continue this discussion, I encourage you to go back and re-read my comments. Engage the statements I made or ask questions about the points you don't understand. Otherwise, have a good one.

Some people really do just want to be drones and are perfectly happy going in and doing a simple mundane task over and over.

If anything, this last election should have exposed this. There is a whole cohort of people out there that feel they've been slighted and left behind because of the shift in manufacturing. They feel like they should still be able to go in and be a drone and get paid well enough to raise a family.

Not necessarily. If the costs drop as a result of increased efficiency and that's what leads to more sales, it would be unfair to say that not hiring extra workers is like lost jobs.

That's fair-ish, though I think if the costs drop, it at least part of the time means the demand is not being met by some other competitor, who will likely get forced out of the market, which will cost jobs.

> though I think if the costs drop, it at least part of the time means the demand is not being met by some other competitor

Massively false, in fact you've got it exactly backwards. See: very well recorded 50 years of industrial revolution era history.

The price of consumer goods, and the cost of producing them, dropped aggressively for decades during that time. It was not due to the lack of competition (demand not being met by another company); competition was the reason for it. Specifically, competition competes the margin away.

Input costs and end consumer prices would rise if the demand were being left unfilled by other companies (ie if the market were, for some reason, totally or partially devoid of competition), until competition arrived again. The lack of competition tends to inflate costs across the entire supply chain.

That's just moving the needle though. Demand for lower prices from a competitor would likely come through some efficiency and humans are the most inefficient part of most enterprises - so more than likely there would be less and less job growth over time anyway. What you describe is creative destruction, except Amazon is doing it to themselves.

I totally agree. Like I said in my first post, I think this is great. But I think the way it's being framed as not killing jobs is disingenuous. It is killing jobs, and that's ok. That's the way progress works.

Or maybe we just end up with more stuff at the margin?

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