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Comment by ahnick | Hacker News Reader

The long term solution is automate as much as possible and subsidize/invest in education. A robot in china more or less costs the same as a robot in the US. We are never going to be able to compete with the Chinese or other southeast asian countries with human labor costs. The next part of the solution is education and re-education of the labor force. If there is any place where deficit spending can make a real impact it is education. Student loan forgiveness, universal basic income for people going to school (university/vocational/community/etc), monetary incentives for going into highly skilled professions, increased teacher pay, etc. The key is transitioning the workforce to a knowledge based economy. Trying to resurrect the manufacturing jobs of yore is a sure-fire way to slow economic decay.

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I feel strongly that the long term solution is to end our reliance on jobs for individual survival. If we automate the industries that produce what people need for survival, and we find some way of collectivizing those industries (I only support voluntary non governmental collectivization of industry via common share holding schemes), then we can make the marginal cost of living close to zero.

To me it seems perfectly reasonable that in 50-100 years people would no longer need to work to stay alive (as the norm). Productivity will continue to grow due to the high output (assisted by automation) of those who continue to work. The limits of a life supported by public infrastructure will still encourage anyone capable of doing useful work to do so, but no one would be cast away and suffering from lack of work.

I write about this at: http://tlalexander.com/machine

Karl Marx once imagined an idealized economy. He called it communism. These theories rarely work in practice. I can't say with confidence whether or not your theory will succeed, but speaking purely from a perspective of probability, what you propose will unlikely be what's ahead for us in the future.

Thanks for your comment! Sorry for the downvotes, I see you're actually trying to make good conversation.

I think Marx's analysis of capitalism is over emphasized as a cause of the murderous regimes we saw under the "Communist" label in the 20th century. Stalin wanted control of the people, and he knew that Marx was very popular among the people at the time. But while I'm not an expert on all of these things, I don't think Marx advocated for the violent methods we saw used by those brutal regimes who used his name. And remember, Capitalist nations like the US were violent too (millions killed in Vietnam, and for what exactly?), but we don't blame Adam Smith or David Ricardo for those horrors.

When I do mention communism, I mean an agreement between people where some good or service it shared amongst them without any individual or individuals laying specific claim to more than their fair share. Families operate this way with food for example, and employers like Google share food freely this way too. I'm advocating that we build robots that are owned by huge groups of people who then share the rewards of the machines freely.

So it's "communism" because certain things are shared by the community, but people can still have their own private property and make other choices about what they do. It's a libertarian, non-violent non-coercive way to achieve a sort of voluntary communism for only life's most important goods (as decided by the people who choose to participate in these sharing schemes).

I hope that clears it up somewhat!

Not 'rarely,' never. Every time "pure" communism has been tried, it has ended is misery, death, disease, and horror.

What do you think led to misery, death, disease, and horror? I do feel that Capitalist nations also continue to be responsible to misery, death, disease and horror (typically in far off places).

I'm doubtful that "Capitalist nations" exist in the sense of nations founded on an ideology called Capitalism. My impression is that "Capitalism" was originally a pejorative term created by opponents to the established order and came over time to be adopted as a reaction by some of those being criticized to mean what they wanted it to mean. So we have an ongoing struggle over the meaning of the word, and reasoning based on a pretense of shared understanding of the meaning is not productive.

It's not as though someone wrote a Capitalist manifesto that initiated the practice of Capitalism.

You're conflating capitalism with colonialism / imperialism.

Not a single communist thinks "pure" communism has ever been tried, do you think you're being intellectually dishonest and strawmaning "whatever Mao did" as communism instead of using the vast philosophical works of leftists to define it?

I only support voluntary non governmental collectivization of industry via common share holding schemes

There is such a thing as a Sovereign Wealth Fund:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/19/investing/norway-pension-fun...

"The fund is among the world's biggest investors in stocks, owning $667 billion worth of shares in over 9,000 companies globally. It owns on average 1.3% of all listed companies worldwide"

Your thoughts seem to have some similarity to the writings of Richard Wolff (WSDE, Worker self-directed enterprises, essentially cooperatives). AFAIU Noam Chomsky is also advocating similar stuff. Though not in the context of vast unemployment caused by AI/automation.

But yeah, if it turns out that the AI/automation revolution leaves vast numbers of people unemployed, we're in for some drastic social upheaval. Hopefully it will not result in a repeat of the bloodbaths of the 20th century communist revolutions.

You've correctly identified some of my heaviest influences. ;)

I've met Richard Wolff and have read his book Democracy at Work (which he signed). I'm also interested in what Gar Alperovitz talks about among others.

Chomsky has talked at length about automation. AI is a new one, but even back in the 1960's Martin Luther King Jr was talking about how to overcome the problems of automation. This Noam Chomsky interview [1] from 1976 talks about his belief in something like The Machine. He says that it makes sense for an advanced technological society to automate away the drudgery of survival. He goes further to elaborate how work that can't be automated could be shared amongst the people rather than relegating one class of society to do that work. In a way, deciding not to have class suddenly means you want to automate as much as possible, because in either case you don't want to do the hard work yourself. We can only maintain a class based society because we're satisfied making some people do work we don't want to do.

What I write about, is how you can make your society in to sort of a small closed system, where there becomes a fixed number of things needed to maintain a certain standard of living. People can then decide if that standard of living is better than life in the more traditional worker-based capitalist system, where most people end up being workers. And to reiterate - the system I'm describing still meets the definition of "capitalist" by most western libertarian standard, because it is still based on voluntarily agreed contracts and depends on the notion of private property (shares) to operate. It also necessarily requires economic (capitalist) exchange to the outside world to get things the society cannot itself produce. It's an engineering solution, in my mind, to what Chomsky and others talk about.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_x0Y3FqkEI

While I don't think tariffs are a solution to economic troubles, I have to admit I see a fair amount of irony in your comments about education[1].

> We are never going to be able to compete with the Chinese or other southeast asian countries with human labor costs

Immediately followed by:

> The next part of the solution is education and re-education of the labor force

We educate our labor, they educate their labor; theirs is still cheaper.

A knowledge-based economy isn't a panacea; knowledge, like capital, is really cheap to move around (compared to manufactured goods).

The GGP says "Artificially 'creating' or 'protecting' jobs doesn't help anyone, at least not in the long run". Having worked in a large company, I find that statement quite amusing. The proportion of "actual" jobs to "artifical" jobs is tremendous. I'm not saying that all those people with "artifical" jobs don't do anything, but from a pure economic efficiency standpoint their work is probably unnecessary. So if successful companies can do it, why not at least entertain some amount of protectionism at a country level?

[1] With that said, I think education is important for the long term health of our society. I just don't think education will fix the economic struggles currently facing many residents of the US.

Knowledge is not cheap to move around. (At least not currently) Information is cheap to move around though. This perhaps is a subtle distinction, but an important one. Maybe eventually when we can directly write knowledge into peoples' heads (something akin to the Matrix) then I'd agree knowledge is cheap, but until that day comes knowledge will remain expensive. Chiefly because to be highly knowledgeable a great deal of time is involved in mastering the relevant information.

I actually agree though that Chinese citizens or anyone else can learn the same information, so overtime we can expect these jobs to become cheaper as more and more people learn them. In fact, I think some re-balancing of economic power is inevitable as a knowledge based economy likely favors the country with more brains. (This is why I think the US should actually be encouraging immigration or at least not actively trying to deter it) The one downside China has going for it (which is perhaps a benefit for the US) is the level of totalitarian control that exists with the government. If China was more of a democracy then I think the economic future of the US would be in even more jeoparady. People don't like to be controlled and more information will make people resistant to that control.

I don't think a knowledge-based economy is a panacea, but it's much better than what we currently have going and I think UBI will play a role in providing the country-level protectionism you reference.

One may ask then, if large corporations have so much dead weight, then why do they exist? My surmise is that the dead weight fraction in a large company may make them less competitive, but the ease of sharing knowledge within a company versus between companies compensates on average.

Education for what? Do you imagine that there is sufficient demand for technically skilled workers to absorb millions and millions more people? What happens when those jobs are automated as well?

You can see my reply in another response... IMHO the long long term answer is convergence. Well it's probably either convergence or total eradication by intelligent machines, so I'm going with convergence for now. :-)

It takes 3 technologists to create a robot that can do the job of hundreds.

So if that robot took the job of 100 laborers, then lets say those 100 laborers decided to become technologists... then for every robot made we'd have 3 technologists employed to design robots and 93 technologists unemployed. How is this problem solved? Please don't say universal income.

Knowledge has the property of needing only a few people who can fill demand.

Sure, but as technology develops faster new jobs will emerge; therefore, even though traditional jobs are shrinking newer positions will open up. What we can say for sure is that there will be whole new fields and jobs tomorrow that don't even exist today and those will need workers (human and non-human). I think UBI may be useful to afford people the time to make transitions to these new roles.

Well, things eventually worked out in the Industrial revolution and most people were able to get a decent paying job and enjoy a good standard of living.

However, I don't think it's a law of nature that "things will always work out ok". It's not written in stone anywhere that the AI/automation/whatever revolution will result in people having jobs, just different ones than what the Industrial revolution resulted in.

What if the future turns out to be that those in control of the capital (automated factories, data for running AI algorithms on, data centres, whatever..) manage to get by without the services of a vast middle class? Will it mean the return of a fabulously wealthy 1% and the rest living in squalor, like the royalty and serfs of bygone eras?

> I don't think it's a law of nature that "things will always work out ok"

So long as people like you keep asking the critical questions, we're not lost :)

Lots of resources/jobs could be spent making life better for the majority of people. UBI is an extreme example of this. Universal health care, free higher education, solving homelessness, a human justice system, entertainment, could all use more resources.

The question is if America has the will to make this happen. As it won't be possible with state-sponsored wealth redistribution. I suspect European countries will be a lot better at finding the balance.

Educate and re-educate toward what exactly? Knowledge economy jobs are being upset by technology almost as fast as manufacturing jobs. See financial adviser and paralegal positions as examples. Your solution also naively assumes that people in their 40s and 50s who have only ever had one type of job can all magically re-train into knowledge economy jobs that may or may not be available where they live. The whole "we just need to re-align the labor force" argument has never made sense to me.

It happens over time, but there is a lot of collateral damage in the meantime (the luddites never retrained because of the automated looms, they simply died out).

That's simple. The jobs that are in demand and are needed. Software development, green energy, healthcare, etc. These jobs are not currently being upset by technology, which can easily be seen by the salaries that companies are willing to pay for these skilled workers. If you were correct about the speed of disruption then you should expect lower salaries across the board, but that is not what is being observed. You can cherry pick a few jobs of course, but even your example of paralegals is an exaggeration. (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/paralegal)

People are very adaptable and given the option of living in poverty or going back to school, I'm pretty sure I know what most people would pick. Say what you will about coding bootcamps, but I'm willing to bet that someone who completes a 15 week course will have much better job prospects (and receive higher pay) than someone who does not. A lot of people just need a little financial help to make the transition and that is where the government can help.

There's no magic involved here. Just common sense policy and hard work.

Until they make a robot that can change out bedpans at nursing homes and hospitals, nursing is going to be an incredibly in demand field as the Baby Boomers retire, grow old, and require care.

Technology seems to be a field where the more tech is created, the more problems come up. There used to be typists who specialized in punching cards until the IDEs and compilers automated away their jobs. Their used to be entire staffs of people who would run programs one-after-the-other, until modern operating systems automated away their jobs.

Each time a job is automated away in tech, it seems like 10 more pop up.

> The long term solution is automate as much as possible and subsidize/invest in education.

Does that take into the account that automation can more easily eat away at the low end of the (broad) IQ requirements of specific jobs? Otherwise it will only benefit some subset of the population and further increase wealth inequalities.

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