Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

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>> Advances in technology allow people to offer news services and new technologies that previously had not existed

That's the real interesting question. What will they be ?

Some i can see:

- more machines -> more machine maintenance and setup. But it'll be under the guidance of machines(AR, AI), So it won't require expertise, it would only require a medium or low amount of "good hands" skills. So the pay won't be good.

- i would have said more marketing/selling, but given the amount of marketing and tiny niches that exist today, i'm not sure that's the case. And in any case AI will be better than us at that.

If there would be more money( a big if, maybe we're heading for a different equilibrium):

- more money -> more goods being bought -> more jobs on the manufacturing/retail/supply-chain which mostly will be machine maintenance etc.

- more money -> more human based services being bought(basically selling good interpersonal skills, and care).

- more money -> more/better healthcare

- more money -> more travel, hospitality ?

Anybody got other ideas?

I am not certain what evidence you could point to to suggest that any of the things you suggest is done with more money ever actually happens. We have very concrete real evidence that all of that 'more money' goes into financial services companies, and all gains go back into the financial services industry. Companies hire workers when they need more money, not when they have an excess. Workers generate profit for companies, they're not a sink. Once those companies can purchase robots rather than workers, if it's profitable they will do that of course (and I would rather be starving to death in the street than doing a job that a cheap machine could be doing better, I've seen some people suggest we reserve some low skill jobs for humans and I think that sounds like the worst and cruelest torture imaginable). The gains they make from those robots will not be used to hire new workers, it would obviously be better spent purchasing new robots and if that would serve to reduce demand for their products from oversaturating the market, they will send the money to the financial services industry.

Every choice has positives and negatives, however. Robots are good at some things, and bad at others. This could lead to an interesting clash. Robots, modular manufacturing, etc is very good at producing large numbers of identical copies of a product. There is no guarantee that society will continue to value this over production of a wide variety instead. If every production run is in numbers of dozens rather than millions, the advantages of automation start to falter. It's also important not to underestimate the power of human brain flaws. One of the flaws of the human brain is 'essentialism'. It's a complicated concept, but boils down to people might see robot-produced goods as not as 'rich' as human-produced goods, even when they are identical. Essentialism is the belief that an objects history is somehow attached to it. And if society decides that an object which has a human hand in it is far more valuable than a 'soulless' robot-produced good... whoops. That could seriously limit what products robots are actually able to bring value to. Human sense of value is what rules the economy, not objective value.

There were many tradeoffs made back when production centralized into factories and big companies. All of those tradeoffs are up for renegotiation, and those who simply assume the choices made 100+ years ago are going to stand will be, I think, sorely disappointed.

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