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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

Or we stop it from happening. It isn’t inevitable. We are all of us making a choice to allow it.

You’re right. We could also make the choice to smash cars, because they take jobs away from the horse and buggy industry. We won’t, because the problem is not humanity’s total productive output growing larger, but how this output is managed and distributed.

There are things much more important than humanity's 'total productive output', which is anyway not guaranteed to ever be managed and distributed in a better way. Human beings are not economic production units. The economy is a means and not an end.

Technologists are always hyperfocused on economic activity and insist that any problems technology creates will be solved by more technology. Well, all we appear to be doing is building an ever more complex and fragile civilization full of increasingly unhappy people racing towards Armageddon. What will trigger the ultimate systems collapse? I don't know, but I would be shocked if there isn't one within the next two centuries.

Yes, we probably would be better off without cars. Communities would be stronger, more tightly-knit. Urban sprawl would dramatically decrease. There'd be more multi-family housing. We would have spewed jillions of tons fewer of CO2 and other pollutants into the air (electric cars do not solve underlying environmental issues - they just shift them around to battery production and disposal and power generation.) One of the biggest causes of accidental death would be eradicated.

Instead of developing ICE/electric engines and understanding the best way to fit them into human society, we unleashed them willy-nilly and caused untold death, devastation, and misery. Such is the story of many if not most subsequent technological 'innovations'. (Yes, I have a car - two, even.)

Even now the 'ideal' Hacker News poster is hard at work at enriching fabulously wealthy companies intent on destroying privacy forever and creating dopamine addictions. We all say it's inevitable. But it's not. Every step of the way, it was individuals making decisions that led us to where we are now. We could have stopped it and we still can.

Or we can bury our heads in the sand.

Honestly I think its been inevitable once we first started to introduce robots into manufacturing.

Robots replacing humans is not new, we have been doing this for at least 40 years.

Resources continue to be spent on this technology (and related technology, even if not originally for this purpose).

Unless we stop any robotic research, its happening wether we like it or not.

It's important to note this mentality has not worked out well in the past:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Birth_of_the_movement

With progress comes new opportunities. It may not happen fr everyone, immediately, but it will happen.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Blithely assuming that it is is dangerous.

The fact that, in the past, the economy created new jobs and new sectors that the majority of people were capable of working in does not guarantee that it always will. Nor when it does is that any consolation to the people un(der)employed for years on end or sometimes for the rest of their life.

In the long run, we are all dead.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences are a hiccup in human history. Human history is a blip in the world's history. There are no laws when it comes to this. Unless you can provide some other very good reason for believing that more jobs, and good jobs, will be created than those are destroyed, I will have to doubt it given the evidence before me.

Indeed, even many 'good' jobs are actually economically unproductive and totally unfulfilling make-work. Today's situation is much worse than it appears at first glance.

The biggest difference in the past (i.e. industrial revolution) was that a human was still required when technology improved and the increased output only occurred from that tech when workers were skilled up to use it appropriately. Also training more workers in these new skills meant even more output and a potential edge against your competitors as that multiplier would carry to workers trained. Each worker gives you more productivity but you still need more workers to scale output. This obviously results an "arms-race" mentality from employers to train staff to fill the gap to take the lead against competitors. It also adds bargaining power to the skilled worker - if they strike instead of not producing that multiplier/leverage works against the employer as they miss out on more output than if an untrained worker strikes. They may even have to shut down their factory or whatever. Leverage and worker productivity work both ways for the employer; it's one of the big reasons cited for the rise of worker unions and arguably the rise of the middle class since then.

The first wave was all about making people more efficient (higher output multipliers for effort); the next wave may very well make people redundant in the economic production equation. If one person is all that's required to scale infinitely (O(1)) OR people aren't required once the capital is built the share of gains to workers IMO erode substantially and mainly accrue to capital holders. Particularly if those gains result in a concentration of market power to one company.

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