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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Look, more simple but labor intensive jobs being replaced by automation. Our society will definitely need to solve this problem sooner than later. Soon we won't have any jobs left that can be done without an education.

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If we completely automate food production and house construction perhaps they'll become cheap enough that it doesn't matter

Food production is already plenty cheap in the developed world. In the 50s in the US middle class people still worried about the price of milk and butter and the working class did not have the option of eating out for every meal. Even Mexico, a middle income country, has an obesity problem rather than a malnutrition one.

In areas with high demand the constraint on building housing is zoning, not cost of construction. You can build in masonry up to eight stories high as long as you have elevators. With steel frame much higher obviously. Everywhere the cost of housing is substantially above construction plus land costs the reason is zoning.

> Food production is already plenty cheap in the developed world.

Even a lot of that is hugely inflated at the various steps to get to the consumer, in developing countries basic staples can be astonishingly cheap by western standards. Even semi-developed India you can have a decent diet for roughly $4USD a day: https://www.numbeo.com/food-prices/country_result.jsp?countr...

Definitely for far less. In one of the most expensive private universities in Pakistan, in the cafeteria you can eat three "home-cooked meals" for $4USD/day. I.e. on top of the ingredients you are paying for cooking/cleaning labor and space. You can eat for maybe half that at home.

This stuff has been said for years, but it's almost 2020, when do you consider soon? If anything, more jobs will be created as we can mass produce goods at home without going through China et al. In fact in my country, they can't find anyone to pick the fruit even for very decent wages (even if the picker sucks).

On the issue of skilled work, if i was a male with no skills or family, I'd be becoming a truck driver right now due to all the doom and gloom which already has led to shortages. The truth is, a lot of these automation problems are very hard to solve.

That is something I thing about frequently. On one hand, I think it's great to have self-sustaining homes/neighborhoods that require minimal manual repetitive work. Then I think that there are lots of people who know nothing but that. knowledge". If you lose the ability to adapt and learn (something we all probably do as we age), then you are left out.

This is why retraining programs are often inneffective and why i support ubi and andrew yang

There is another side of the coin - to make universal basic income work cost of foodstuff, healthcare, and construction (and thus housing) needs to be pushed extremely low. This kind of automation enables it.

There is no argument that automating these jobs will incur tremendous human suffering by taking away jobs. However, in the long term I don't want anyone to be 'harvesting lettuce'.

Or we could expand wage subsidies like the earned income tax credit. That has the advantage of not causing labour supply to drop precipitously and would cost much less than UBI so it could be implemented far sooner. And if the math on UBI comes anywhere near working out you passed the point of being able to afford wage subsidies long ago.

But harvesting lettuce can be fun - in your own garden on your own time of course. Not back destroying wage labour...

How did we do it so far? It wasn't long ago that most of us didn't have an education.

It depends on the adoption curve. Right now farmers are having a hard time finding summer hands to harvest some types of produce. Fewer teenagers and adults want to work as farmhands, so this is a net benefit in this industry.

Yep. Logic next step is UBI. What of all the poor countries with millions of uneducated that need UBI but the country doesn't have a upper end to carry the UBI?

I don't see how that's gonna work :(

Globalization has been bringing up living conditions across the entire planet for 50+ years now. Presumably that trend would continue such that they could get the eduction they need, possibly through foreign aid or through sharing the bounties of the natural resources in those countries.

But you're right, it will be a hard problem to solve if we continue to separate wealth by country. At the end of the day we'd need a planetary economy to really deal with it.

This is a good thing: we are already significantly over the carrying capacity of the planet. A managed decline of population down to a couple of billion engineers, and robots for everything else, would mean a much better quality of life for the average human, and much better outcomes for the environment. Then, when we expand beyond Earth, we can grow the population again.

Technological developments have always driven the human species forward - all of this is nothing new. The difference now is the extremely high populations (enabled by technologies invented elsewhere in the world) in some countries with excessive unemployment levels.

Genetic engineering and molecular biology will also enable us to identify the genes which contribute the most to useful traits, and to expand access to those genes to a greater portion of humanity

"A managed decline of population"

So. What do you propose?

Global access to education, contraception, and abortion for women, for starters. Redirect foreign aid away from food aid and towards this purpose. If you feel that your family cannot support a child, it should be within your power to control that. Many women simply do not have that choice.

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