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Comment by alexbeloi | Hacker News Reader

>Going from 100 workers at a factory to 50 workers means the 50 workers remaining have harder and more valuable jobs.

This is not necessarily true. It could mean turning 100 people doing skilled labor and turning them into 50 workers doing visual inspection (QA) at likely lower pay.

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Someone is going to need to inspect output at both versions of the factory.

Anyway, everyone can be limited to visual inspection someone needs to maintain the machines and deal with issues that develop.

Maybe, my point is that isn't not a 'win' for the laborer like you seem to suggest, that maybe 50% of the people losing their jobs get to work better jobs. The people losing their jobs that are lucky enough to not be laid off are more likely be relegated to lower paying and lower skill inspection jobs rather than the higher skilled machine maintenance/development.

IMO, the most likely outcome of your scenario is: 19/100 of the workers become visual inspection team, (maybe) 1/100 of the workers becomes a manager for visual inspection team, 5 external machine specialists get hired, 80/100 of the workers get laid off and 75/80 of those will continue same line of work for even less pay (supply/demand) and 5/80 will burn through any personal savings/credit to retrain themselves with the hopes of becoming one of the '5 external machine specialists' hired somewhere else.

These numbers are definitely made up by me based on my own world view. From the original 100 laborers, 94/100 of the original people are worse off than before and in exchange we have 5 (maybe 6) new skilled positions.

I'm not against automation or productivity or higher skilled work, I'm personally invested in all three, I just think that if we aren't aware of all the consequences that we are likely to be blind-sided by a resurgence of Luddite riots.

I would suggest you actually try and base things on facts not gut feelings. Because that's not what actually happens at a factory. I have no objection to saying the 50 people laid off will likely be worse off for the next few years. But, automation tends to reduce the need for visual inspections a machine that did it correct on a random sample of 5 / 1000 is likely to do a good job on the other 995. Someone might glance at the rest but that's ~1% of the effort of making something and likely 1 job out of the 100.

At really high levels of automation say 10,000 people replaced by 50 that might be a different story, but I am taking about gradual shits not massive and very rare disruptions.

The question of what happens to everyone else is interesting, but the standard of living has generally increased slightly with increased efficiency. Healthcare may be expensive today, but it was not available 200 years ago. Look back say 20 years and you can get basically all the top drugs from 1997 for cheap today.

Even land is not that bad, you can get an acre of farm land for in some parts of the US for under 1,000$, look at remittances from day labor's and the early American dream is within reach of just about anyone. The real change is people's expectations not their absolute earnings.

PS: Now, what separates factory jobs from most work is the power of Unions and the ability to strike effectively. Unions tend to increase worker pay irrespective of the free market, but that's a different story.

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