Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

This complaint about robots and AI taking all our jobs is hundreds of years old. Still hasn't happened. US is at record levels of employment. Humans are terrible at predicting the future. Let's just wait and see and react when it actually happens. My guess... there will be plenty of jobs for humans for thousands of years to come.

Ever since the industrial revolution jobs have gone by the wayside. We no longer have wagon wheel makers, or people cutting pins from long spools of wire. If you just look at the jobs going away, you're missing the other side of the picture, the jobs being created.

Jobs are essentially just things that humans do to improve our lives. If you imagine that you were infinitely rich, what kinds of things might you want someone to do that isn't getting done? I've got tons of housework and yardwork, construction work, programming ideas, hell my brain is overflowing with stuff that will never get done. Too many jobs. All those things are jobs. Most of them cannot be automated anytime soon.

If you just look at the jobs going away, you're missing the other side of the picture, the jobs being created.

I don't think Yang is missing the other side of the picture. He's saying that society sucks at getting displaced people to the other side in a humane manner.

I don't disagree with that.

I take real issue with the unemployment rate claim. The federal U-3 rate is a politicized number that has over time been reduced to an incredibly narrow definition. U-6 is much better because it includes discouraged workers who have given up on seeking employment and part-time workers who want full-time (an increasingly large population). In 1994 the BLS changed the U-6 to exclude long-term discouraged workers which had the effect of lowering the rate. As John William's Shadowstats shows, when you adjust long-term discouraged workers back into the U-6 rate unemployment is actually well over 20%.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

    const capital = () => [capital(), capital()]

Humans are an implementation detail in that scheme.

Economic power (the ability to extract, move and transform resources to perpetuate the economy) is gradually moving from people to capital. At some point in the future, it will not make sense for the industry to keep on feeding people, and people won’t have any power left to do something about it.

The jobs you mention are peripheral things meant to keep meatware happy while it is still economically relevant.

There are people who are starving today, whose will to live and imagination is as strong as yours. It turns out they are not economically relevant, and thus we let them die. I don’t expect an automated industry to care more about about us than we do about the unfortunate folks I just mentioned.

And global warming is a scam as well right? Weather seems fine to me.

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