Comment by harmful_stereo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harmful_stereo | Hacker News Reader

I have spent far too much of my life in a warehouse doing this robot's job. A job that according to every pundit from the "smart" to the stupid was supposed to be gone tomorrow. Mostly I'm just disappointed in how clownish all those futurists look.

Completely retooling the society after 70 years of postwar infrastructure is going to take more than anyone would willingly sacrifice. You would have to bomb everything more than a few years old flat. At no point will it be feasible to keep leaving major investment in business and industry tied to the promises of modernizing through bleeding edge technology. The world is so vast and involves such a colossal distribution of existing resources. So many of the systems here are only functioning through broad and cheap standards, like containers, rail gauges, ship sizes.

I don't want my job. I want a machine built to put me out of it for good. I have been saying that along with a generation of workers told robots were coming for their jobs since the day i was hired. That was fifteen years ago.

We need a Manhattan project for the basic tools of industry. Now. There are thousands of novel or unproven methods of doing the most basic forms of labor our economy is based on, and we are leaving the creation of things that need to be ISO standard across the surface of the earth in order to succeed to entrepreneurs and startups and scholastic vanity.

The modern technological landscape across all disciplines looks terrifyingly similar to the cambrian explosion, which produced so many things, at such a cost of living suffering, that did not survive what came after. I'm afraid our civilization might have run out of low-hanging fruit.

To me that is the line of demarcation between the "developed world" and whatever precedes it. I don't think what is beyond that is peaceful. It necessarily undermines the infrastructure the whole society is founded on.

AS/RS systems have been making steady inroads into warehouses despite the lack of bombing runs and those require a lot of disruption. The rolly bots Boston Dynamics is trying to put forward don't really seem to require any infrastructure replacement at all. I really think this is an area where ad hoc experimentation is working and we'd be mistaken to try to create a single standard without trying everything first.

Serious question. What would you do for work if we did get a robot to do your job?

What would I need to work?

Look, we're rapidly approaching a point where all human needs (food, shelter, etc) can be handled by automation. If we reach that point, why do people need to have jobs? Why can't we turn our lives towards something better?

Technologically maybe, politically most countries are still very very far away.

>If we reach that point, why do people need to have jobs? Why can't we turn our lives towards something better?

Because we will likely still be living in capitalist societies in which people increasingly unable to provide value to the marketplace due to automation will still need income to survive, and no one implementing that automation has any intention of doing so in order to usher in some kind of post-scarcity collectivist utopia.

Automation exists to allow the ownership class to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of compensating human employees, not to free the labor classes from having to work.

Well, I’m a working robotics engineer in the Silicon Valley area and I am trying to design robotics for a post scarcity collectivist utopia. At home I do research in to functional 3D printed robotics and I operate a YouTube channel and discussion website [1] to pull people together so we can discuss collectively owned automated communities. I’m a fan of Murray Bookchin and want to live in a collectively owned automated farming commune. I’ve just taken a new job on an actual farm as a robotics engineer, and we’re going to try to build automation for farming.

I’m also a writer and I study the intersection of automation and society.

So while it’s true that most automation engineers don’t think this way, some of us do. :-)

[1] http://reboot.love

It's not the engineers I'm talking about so much as business owners, stockholders and politicians, the people actually writing the laws and making the decisions about how automation is going to shape the future.

The problem with seeing automation as a means to liberate people from capitalism and free them for intellectual pursuits (a noble and laudable goal) is that it exists to serve capitalist ends. Amazon, for instance, is definitely not automating for the benefit of humanity. They just don't want to pay people.

Although it is good to know someone is thinking about it. I really worry that, at scale, mass employment won't be addressed until it actually threatens the status quo.

I absolutely agree with you. I don’t think there’s much I can do to stop what’s currently got so much momentum. The capitalists will capitalize and the workers will be treated as tools to be taken on and used when needed to fill in the gaps, and quality of life for many people will continue to be low even as some of us travel to other worlds.

But the technology, while not liberating, will become more accessible. And I think a lot of people, just as in many decades past, are interested in something beyond bare capitalism.

My hope is that the collectivists can make progress in the coming decades too. We can develop our own open source alternatives to the machinery of dystopia. We can abandon intellectual property as a concept and ensure that when we labor for new development, the knowledge we gain is accessible to everyone who wants to liberate themselves.

And just as a group of hobbyists and corporations built Linux, perhaps we could build our own alternative to dystopia.

Politically right now I think we need unity and we need to stop trying to use the government to solve our problems. The government is a tool of force and force cannot be the way we build utopia except perhaps as defense against those who would have it shut down.

https://youtu.be/V6HWLJqTASA

This might be good point to mention the only 2020 presidential candidate who is talking about how UBI could address this seemingly inevitable future that is closer than we think.

Andrew Yang. See his discussion with students at Georgetown Univ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tuJ0phjFys

or for a longer exposition of his ideas see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTsEzmFamZ8

UBI represents a continuation of capitalism where the machinery of our world is still under elite control. I’d rather see a candidate that will provide seed funding for cooperatives. Way more liberatory than cash handouts from our rulers.

Isn't seed funding for cooperatives also basically a cash handout from our rulers?

Yes, though much more directed than UBI. Credit Unions are well positioned to provide loans for coops. The government could provide some backing for those loans to stimulate growth. That’s way, way less intervention than a UBI.

Hmm, certainly Amazon doesn't want to pay anyone, robot, company or human more than they have to to do a job. Does that benefit humanity? For it's customers and shareholders yes, for the replaced warehouse worker, maybe not. But even that can be argued.

Holy cow that's awesome.

Thanks!

I'm guessing you're a Cory Doctorow fan too? I thought Walkaway was very interesting, though not his best novel.

I don’t read a lot (YouTube lectures are my thing) but I’ve liked what I’ve seen of Cory Doctorows work. Someone has recommended Walkaway to me.

This is not necessarily true. See: The washing machine, which gave people an average of ten hours of free-time more each week when it was invented. And countless other inventions that automate away manual labor and are accessible to average people.

The washing machine and other household appliances only allowed women to reallocate their labor time to the market rather than at home.

Do they?

That isn't accurate. The electric washing machine was first invented and sold en masse in 1928. It wasn't until seven to eight decades later that women started participating in the labor force more broadly. Until then, and even now, the washing machine contributes a significant amount to extra leisure time. And indeed, Americans have a lot of leisure time. That is how we are able to spend 35 hours a week on average on watching television. (Source: Nielsen report on television consumption)

Seven to eight decades after 1928 is 1998-2008. Female participation in the labor force grew significantly prior to that, though the main impetus was probably the Second World War.

Only 43.3 percent of women worked outside the home in 1970. It'd be some time yet after that before most of them did. The point was that your argument against the washing machine was incorrect. Those 10-15 hours a week were actual gains for the working class. Women didn't jump into the labor force right after that machine was created and sold, after all.

It was an enabling factor but not a causative factor.

Another question: what proportion of homes had washing machines by year starting in 1928? Large proportions of American homes weren’t even electrified in 1928.

It is in their own interest that the inequality doesn't grow past a certain point. Even an army of robots can do very little against a hungry mob.

Please, let's not ever find out how a hungry mob fares against a emotionless robot army. I don't think it would be pretty.

Right now the robot/automation is not cheap enough/easy enough for individual people to operate it. If these become reality the traditional capitalist societies will change and it won't be necessary for people to provide value to other human to survive.

Capitalism is just an abstraction for the human condition.

I’ve researched this extensively and I’m convinced we could have done this in the developed world starting 100 years ago, but individuals in a position of power preferred to accumulate wealth themselves rather than distribute earnings equitably.

So I don’t believe an automated utopia is going to happen automatically. We’ve got to work to create corporate structures that naturally reward all of the workers instead of a few at the top. Cooperatively run companies are one way to do this. If the major companies of our world were cooperatives, a wide swath of the population would gain the wealth our world is increasingly producing.

But technology alone won’t solve the problem. We need to intentionally structure our society in a way that makes this socialist utopia possible. That’s what I study and I’m trying to figure it out. I’m also a robotics engineer.

> and I’m convinced we could have done this in the developed world starting 100 years ago

I'm interested in reading more about this. Do you have books/research papers you recommend?

Well, I’ve definitely found Chomsky’s work helpful as a libertarian socialist critique of the state. His book “On Anarchism” helped lay out to me how collectivist movements of the past have often failed by direct violent repression from the state.

I’ve not read Karl Marx but I’ve learned from others that his critique of capitalism is worthwhile and relevant today and has been since it was written.

At one time I found Richard Wolff helpful, including his book “Democracy at Work” about worker run collectives. His lectures may be of value but lately I find him hard to listen to because of how kind of smarmy he gets.

This interview with Murray Bookchin from 1986 was pretty informative: https://youtu.be/kBP_BMOblzc

Otherwise the subject of interest is called “anarchism” or “libertarian socialism” or “communism”. It all falls under the broader umbrella of “socialism”, which is the intentional organization of society to produce a certain quality of life for all people. All of those terms have been heavily loaded by history and it’s propaganda, so you have to search carefully. Pundits of all persuasions will make broad claims about these social sciences, but know this: socialism and the other ideas laid out have a rich and complex history that absolutely must be researched. Ignore anyone who says the soviets were socialist and they were horrible so socialism is horrible. There is a history of socialist movements going back over 150 years that includes many writers and activists including those who were murdered by the soviets or the nazis precisely because they wanted power in the hands of the people, not the state.

When you look this up, also study imperialism, feminism, the black panthers and black liberation moments, lgbtq movements, and liberation movements in other countries. If you’re white and/or otherwise privileged (as I am) know that the experience of less privileged people are so different from yours that they absolutely cannot be excluded from the development of a utopia.

For more information see here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/

It's going to be a rough transition, but it will happen.

There's going to be a tipping point where the distribution of wealth is so unbelievably bad that voters will finally start voting for policies that will redistribute more equitably.

I don’t think voting could solve the problem because I believe the problem is concentration of power in corporations and governments. How could the government, which is captured by wealthy interests, ever bring about liberation of the people? The history of liberation movements is that they are suppressed by governments.

There are elected governments that are not beholden to the specific moneyed interests that want to keep control of robots. If we reach the threshold of post-scarcity, where robots build robots and the only barrier against duplicates-at-cost is patents or copyrights, then some countries will reject the intellectual property norms promoted by wealthy developed countries. It has happened already with drug patents. The people of Johannnesburg may get cheap robots a generation ahead of those of Boston. Liberation could start at the edges of the current economic world order and diffuse toward the center.

Absolutely! I see intellectual property as harmful and focus myself on developing totally open source technology. I’ve made one trip to teach robotics in a foreign country and I hope that over time open source could fill needs in the fringes when capitalism doesn’t, eventually leading to a more liberated world outside the capitalist center.

That tipping point may pass by the time enough voters self educate or educate each other about inequality in the distribution of wealth, at which point revolution becomes more likely.

I don't understand how technology alone won’t solve the problem. If I have a technology that can provide me my basic need (food,shelter,etc) and it cheap enough and easy enough for me to operate myself, in a way that I can be self sufficient without relying of other human, how is the notion of traditional job will not change in this situation ?

I think his point was that right now, if that technology did exist someone would decide that you need their permission (and some payment of course) to operate it and show up with soldiers if you tried anyway.

Total individual self sufficiency is not really the best solution - collective self sufficiency is. But once we start collaborating, we fall in to structures where all the benefit we create ends up in the bank accounts of a few people instead of building a utopia. It takes a different structure to society, not mere technology, to change this situation.

Moreover: liberating technology will not be developed by the capitalist establishment because our liberation runs counter to the opportunity we represent as tools to be exploited. This is why Silicon Valley relies on surveillance and the big companies don’t share their key source code. They don’t have the goal of liberating us.

Do you mean someone or some group of people is going to prevent the invention of this technology (individual self sufficiency) ?

Invention of technology doesn't rely on capitalist establishment though, as long as there is at least one engineer out there to work on it just for the sake of it. For example, the invention of linux.

No, but technology does not spontaneously occur. I am in fact a huge advocate of the development of liberatory technology like Linux, but I emphasize that actual people have to be working on that problem for the technology to develop. It is not the case that it simply “will happen”. It will only happen if we build it. The capitalists will not build it.

The amount of labor necessary to satisfy basic needs has went down significantly over the last hundred years, but the amount of labor needed to afford satisfying basic needs has not. A successful strategy for full automation would see work hours gradually reduce until they hit zero.

The reason this has happened is that we use an economic system where laborers are paid market rate and the owners are paid the rest. So when we automate something new, the market rate for labor stays the same (at best), but reduced costs mean there's a bigger chunk leftover for the owners. So business owners capture all the returns from automation. As long as this holds, you should expect increased automation to benefit whoever already owns the machines, not society at large.

And there are lots of possible solutions for this, some quite simple, but they're all considered socialism or communism, so when you start talking about them people assume you want Soviet Russia and stop listening.

Agreed. But I believe worker ownership of the means of production can be achieved legally in our present system. A network of cooperatives could ethically support its members, and there would be no elite owners to suck up the wealth they generate.

> I’ve researched this extensively and I’m convinced we could have done this in the developed world starting 100 years ago, but individuals in a position of power preferred to accumulate wealth themselves rather than distribute earnings equitably.

Bucky Fuller wrote "GRUNCH of Giants" which says something similar.

("GRUNCH" is GRoss UNiversal Cash Heist)

https://fullerfuturefest.com/humanitys-critical-path-from-we...

> Cooperatively run companies are one way to do this. If the major companies of our world were cooperatives, a wide swath of the population would gain the wealth our world is increasingly producing.

How do you imagine we manufacture for example microprocessors in such scenario? I.e. how does a group of people start the next Intel as a co-op, without ever taking any external capital? BTW I've sent the same question to Chomsky some time ago, but no response yet.

Well this could be done with anarchist communism where the economy is made up of a network of communes that trade with one another. Of course to build microprocessors you need to develop some wealth, so like any economy they’d have to grow slowly starting with smaller things. But over time I see no reason why a network of communes couldn’t amass the wealth necessary to build microprocessors. Although one issue is that communists are I think less focused on wealth accumulation.

Generally one of two things needs to happen.

Either a new industry, or new innovations in existing industries, creating more low-skill jobs in the same manner that previous industries have done.

Or make the need to work in order to make a living obsolete for many.

Many retired people return to work after retirement out of boredom. Humans need tasks, be it for money or purpose. If we arent trying to attain food or shelter due to automation, what's the point? Not everyone takes well to hobbies. It might be great several generations in the future, but it's going to be a culture shock for those raised on working.

Let's imagine a future where all farming has become fully automated. I'm sure some people will still want to live on farms (although perhaps not the commerical sized ones we've got now), and grow crops, raise chickens, etc. But, they get to do so without the pressure of having to succeed or they starve.

Maybe some people actually like that stress and pressure to succeed (lest they starve); takes all kinds.

I appreciate your optimism but I'm skeptical to the extreme that it is achievable.

>why do people need to have jobs? Why can't we turn our lives towards something better?

Answer: the basic faults inherent in basic human nature that have prevented us from getting along at any point in human history : avarice(greed), lust, sloth, envy, gluttony, etc. General religious intolerance and ethnic hatred, war, prejudice, etc. And that's just among the so-called normal people. Factor in psychopathic behavior and it's not difficult to find an answer. But that only covers behavioral issues.

Now factor in contributions from natural disaster, drought, pestilence, pollution, scarcity, etc. and this explains why I don't think we have a chance.

What would I need to work?

Because humans want more than just basic human needs addressed?

Your desire for premature standardization would have left our automobiles with one common standard of hand crank.

Everything that died in the Cambrian explosion would have died anyway if they had all been the same species; but having that variety available allowed the best designs to be selected. We wouldn't have humans without it.

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