Where Is Technology Taking the Economy? | Hacker News Reader

Where Is Technology Taking the Economy?

blog.irvingwb.com

45 pointsinetsee56 comments

There's a lot of talk about how AI will "steal jobs". But I think one aspect that doesn't get enough attention is how our physical bodies seem to have major problems adapting (fast enough) to where technology is taking us. Take for example how immobile jobs , combined with bad food (industrialized processed food) and driving has all sorts of negative physical impact. To add to this, self-driving cars will remove the need of a driving skill. Or how address books removed the need to remember phone numbers. I remember in the 90s (4th grade) when could recall the phone number of everyone in my class. Today I honestly don't know anyone's phone number but my own.

How do we account for the fact that the human body and mind seem to need a certain amount/kind of stimulation to not entirely fall apart? Should we just settle with the new bodies technology gives us? Should we settle with simple compensatory measures like going to the gym for lack of moving otherwise?

> How do we account for the fact that the human body and mind seem to need a certain amount/kind of stimulation to not entirely fall apart?

By giving them it. There's vastly more access to mental stimulation than there was a generation ago. I'd be much more concerned about over-stimulation, disruption of sleep patterns etc.

Also, I have no concerns about driving, phones numbers and so on. These were just temporary, inefficient and ineffective means to other ends.

Especially driving. I mean, what a terrible idea. Put a human being into a projectile and make them concentrate, potentially for hours, to not die. What could possibly go wrong?

Physical stimulation is more of a concern for me but there again, it's what we are leaving behind that's truly terrible. Why has there been a profusion of sedentary jobs for the last few decades? Because so many of the devices we interacted with were immovable (or require a fixed posture like driving).

How do you solve that? By removing the need for the fixed posture i.e. mobile devices, automatons to freeing up concentration. We're in a transition phase but I'm very optimistic that the opportunity to act day to day in a healthy way will get better and better.

Is it all roses? No, of course not. Just because you can live healthily doesn't mean you will if you're not required to. What we do about that could easily get us into Black Mirror territory but I'm confident the solutions will be there of we want them i.e. they'll be political not technological challenges.

> I remember in the 90s (4th grade) when could recall the phone number of everyone in my class.

Seems like a waste of brainpower to me.

I remember in the 90s when I couldn't listen to music I wanted without paying £12.99 for a CD. Or when I couldn't do my maths homework because I lost my textbook which my parents had to replace at a cost of £30. Or when I was really upset after going to meet a friend who never showed up and couldn't talk to me to say why until the next day at school (his parent's car had broken down).

Technology is AMAZING, people will be fat even without self driving cars, it's greed and laziness that causes fat to accumulate, not tech.

> it's greed and laziness that causes fat to accumulate

Are Americans much greedier and lazier than they were 40 years ago? Are American animals?

All living things are greedy and lazy. It's not good, but it's also not evil. It's just physics. Humans aren't unusually greedy or lazy. They are just the only ones that beat themselves up over it. Particularly the American ones.

a general reply to the replies of my original post..

When I mentioned mental stimulation I should have emphasized the kind. Stimulation can trigger many mental activities of course - reasoning, analysis, entertainment, contemplation, etc. It's this unbalance, a majority of entertainment that worries me. Don't get me wrong, I love entertainment and mindless stuff and I think it's part of healthy life! So, I don't think it's over stimulation per-se, but a gross unbalance of kinds of stimulation..

But I'm moving away from my main point/question which I think is: can we off-sourcing most our mental abilities without major negative impact on our health? It's not just these mental abilities aren't needed. What are the consequences of a brain that barely uses its memory? What are the consequences when you almost never use your brain for any challenging task? Maybe this will lead to all sorts of mental illnesses...

These are the things I am really curious about

You should memorize the numbers of a few emergency contacts numbers. What if your phone and wallet got stolen. How would you get home?

"In the distributive era free-market efficiency will no longer be justifiable if it creates whole classes of people who lose."

I lean towards the positive side of Universal Basic Income (my core argument is that no kid grows up thinking they want to be inactive) so it's heartening to see more of these arguments come to the fore.

The only problem I see - who will pay for it? Considering that in the future most jobs are automated/remote moving a company somewhere else will pose no problem so taxing them will simply fail

The important question! I value (the late, amazing) Alan Watts' take on this: "The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community."

or put another way "It will simply come from the share of productivity gains made possible by technology that should already be shared."

https://steemit.com/basicincome/@scottsantens/who-pays-for-u...

https://medium.com/basic-income/machine-labor-day-d77931dca9...

The answer is to (re)-impose capital controls to prevent the capital flight you mention. If we're going to live in a bright future then the days of corporations strip-mining the societies they exist in with impunity have got to come to an end.

Make it so that on your death or when you renounce your nationality, all capital you own goes back to the nation.

The trillions hidden away in tax havens would be a start.

UBI is lazy tech guilt thinking. Not to mention it's arrogant. The idea that we've solved all that needs to be done is remarkable. Just look around you. Do you think we are in a place without problems that need resolving? Or work to be done? It's truly a problem of goals of humanity that lead to this disaster of demoralizing pay people to exist UBI thinking. Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society. I'm going to write further on this but the UBI mindset is nothing more than lazy arrogant tech people who have no historical frame.

The guilt thing is real. Every thoughtful person in tech knows that what we produce devalues human skill and produces net job loss.

Yes but the lack of jobs is a political problem. It's a problem of vision and goals. Just like a housing crisis. These can be resolved by changing the rules and goals of the group.

People are not things to be engineered. This is our largest collective blindspot. Some people may look at what you see as utopia and say "no, thanks." This can happen for something as simple as UBI. In fact, I'm sure it will.

Progress is defined by enabling people to do more. Do we really want to go back to making energy with coal? It creates lots of jobs. Jobs that can replace with new better ones. I truly believe we are in a crisis of vision. We have food and many material things met but we haven't moved on to pushing for more progress that creates the new jobs politically.

There's danger there. Politics is easily corruptible and divisive when issues of resource allocation are included. Re progress, I don't have an answer. We could argue that despite eliminating all of the jobs, moving to self-driving cars would be good in the same way that reducing coal mining jobs is: both increase safety. But safety isn't everything. It never has been.

Of course there is work to be done. The problem is usually getting someone to pay for it. You need to look at why people don't spend.

One obvious reason is when they don't have the money. Put money in the hands of people who need it and they will spend it, so the work gets done.

You mention various forms of work. Do you know they are more urgent than what people will spend their money on if given the choice? Maybe it's arrogant to assume you know better than them?

>Put money in the hands of people who need it and they will spend it, so the work gets done.

This is one of the most obvious points that too many miss.

I like the leap of logic where insuring everyone has a minimum standard of living means nobody will ever work again.

UBI has a B in it for a reason. You get to Star Trek "no money replicator based economy" way later. But the fact people go hungry and homeless in a nation where companies hoard trillions of dollars in tax havens is abjectly amoral.

> The idea that we've solved all that needs to be done is remarkable.

Yeah, true. The last time society worried that new technology and machines would lead to mass unemployment, the opposite happened. We're in a bigger hurry than ever. Maybe that will accelerate even more.

But, if the human labor need for the trucking industry goes away, for example, it doesn't matter whether we've solved all problems, we will have a very large class of people out of work, even if it's temporary.

> Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society.

I agree with this too, but one way to think about UBI is that it could, for the first time, pay people for doing things that are valuable to society, but not profitable. The reason we don't pay much for education or fixing climate change or research is our economy is driven on short term economics. If it doesn't lead to more customers or more dollars in the next year, it doesn't get funding. At it's imagined best, maybe UBI could enable an economy of social good rather than profit.

We have huge problems that could be solved with Ubi. Has nothing to do with working or not working for those already without work, a home, food etc. Besides people are capable of creating a tremendous amount of value in their spare time and often do. Ubi could prove to be a decentralised way of paying people for all the things you mentioned.

I think it makes sense to have something other than a pure universal basic income for redistribution of wealth. You want to design an incentive based system to encourage people to contribute to their community, pursue higher education and learning, as well as work.

Some kind of income supplement if you work at least 15 hours per week makes sense, along with a bonus for 'community contribution' of some kind. It makes sense to reduce the overall amount worked, but to still encourage work, and to improve the skillset of workers.

Pure universal basic income has dubious incentives. It's a solution, but I don't think it's close to the best one. Of course, any system, including the idea I'm proposing will be gamed, and have unfortunate side effects from its policies.

UBI is basically a direct cash transfer, which is a form of aid that's been studied in the developing world for many years. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39038402

It has many benefits, including its simplicity. Sure, you could create a framework of incentives and enforcement to make sure only certain people get cash for doing certain things, but those structures will absorb money that might have otherwise gone to the poor. The whole story of international aid, and of UBI if it's done wrong, is a story of propping up inefficient bureaucracies and giving money to aid workers instead of the people who were meant to benefit.

Contribute how? In the long run all jobs will disappear. The latest job to become obsolete will be scientific research.

Or artists, or prostitutes, or athletes.

> It makes sense to reduce the overall amount worked, but to still encourage work, and to improve the skillset of workers.

You're right, just because robots can automatize production doesn't mean we're left with nothing to do. We still have a job - taking care of ourselves, our families and communities.

A jobless person might be a doctor, an engineer, a farmer or a teacher by training. They don't automatically become stupid by being jobless. They have many needs to fulfill and little money, but lots of time. So they will need to become more self reliant.

The life of a community can be self reliant in many ways - a community could cultivate its own food, build houses, primary medical care, kindergarten and primary school education, install solar panels, drill for water, repair and maintenance for various devices - all of these are needs of local people that can be solved by local work.

If, on top of self reliance, people receive an UBI, it will make it count for so much more, and they won't be just idling around all day long. There is a whole economy that can exist just by providing services to each other.

A 4 day work week is the answer. Ford changed the work week from 6 days to 5 days. It's time for another major corporation to set an example and make this move. Pay employees the same they make now for 5 days. For many professions, the same work can be done in 4 days, and for other menial jobs you give peole the opportunity to grow.

I'd like to read more on how Ford managed to change the work week from 6 days to 5 days. Would you kindly direct me to some articles/ books/ PDF's? Sincerely,

Ford realized workers weren't as productive working 48/week.

It's literally the first result:

https://www.google.com/search?q=ford+changed+work+week+from+...

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-work...

In short, Ford likely realized in the 1920s that with the usage of mass manufacturing / shifts, worker effort was more important than hours spent working, and could afford to make the change.

This eventually became codified in the US via the Fair Labor Standard Act of 1938 [1], which defined overtime as anything over 40 hours a week.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_...

>Throughout the Industrial Revolution there were periodic panics about the impact of automation on jobs, going back to the so-called Luddites, - textile workers who in the 1810s smashed the new machines that were threatening their jobs.

This is such a common misconception that the wikipedia entry for luddite mentions it in the first paragraph.

They destroyed weaving machinery for the same reason French taxi drivers shut down roads in 2016.

Revisionist historians depict luddites as anti-technology for the same reason Forbes chose to depict the French taxi drivers as anti-smartphone.

Where it’s alway taken us. Forward.

Not exclusively.

Widespread private car ownership, to take one example, has arguably harmed average quality of life.

Pollution, reduced freedom to walk/bike, extra time having to work out as a result of those last two things (or simply reduced health), and, at an average income, total time lost to the car, including working to pay for it, for insurance, for gas, for maintenance, et c., being so high that it often results in a net loss of time versus foot-powered transportation (without even considering how much denser cities would be without cars), all conspire to create a world where many are pressured to own a car (life is harder without it, areas with good schools may be inaccessible without it, geographical distribution of jobs in cities may be inconvenient to put it mildly, and public transit has largely gone to hell, all because of the side-effects of widespread car ownership) but they actually lose out in terms of time-saved, and a number of other factors, compared with a world where car ownership was restricted.

Just setting technology loose, even with something as seemingly great as the automobile, isn't always a straightforward win for the average person.

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