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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

> Be as cynical as you like. But people's lives are their own.

Are they though? Who exactly would fund the self-actualization adventures of the lucky recipients, if not other people? I'm guessing here, but I assume the funding wouldn't be voluntary. In that case, those people's lives are not their own, those people's lives (and the results of them spending parts of their lives at work) are shared.

> Now that it's approaching, all anybody can think about is "Keep the lower class working! God forbid they have a life!"

I live among the lower class. A good part of them do not work and still have a life.

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Again, 1950's thinking. Most things are automated now. There's only 13M factory workers left in America vs 20M+ in the 70's, and population has doubled since then. So maybe 20% what there used to be. All that due to automation. And what's left is being automated as fast as humanly possible.

After that, we're gonna have a big slug of people out of work, lots of relatively cheap goods, and a few very rich who own most of the factories. How is this gonna play out?

In the best scenario, we go on to a bright future of little work necessary for everyone.

Or, we blame those folks for being 'out of work', let them suffer and die.

The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that. This is the notion we have to get thru everybody's head.

>The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that.

Somebody has to create, build, and maintain those factories. Someone else has to manage the output of those factories and distribute it. Someone else needs to work to secure raw materials for the factory. Age you can't produce everything in factories. You don't have a factory that grows food for example.

Programming, especially web development is a great analogy here. You have tools that do almost all the things you would want a website to do. Why do we need web developers at all then? Because it turns out that connecting everything and fine tuning it for your specific needs is quite difficult.

You don't have a factory that grows food for example.

Yet. Modern farms come pretty close, and there are lots of ideas to close the gap.

The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be.

Yes points to you for noticing there's a supply chain. But that's automating too.

The remaining 'developers' in industry are Engineers. They number a tiny fraction of the human labor that factories used to employ. The idea the we can 'retrain' line workers is nonsense. They can't all become Engineers, even if we needed 30M more Engineers which we don't.

Grasp at straws, sure some business processes might remain unautomated for some time. But it's not going to matter to most Americans. It'll be small change.

>The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be.

Yes, if we still built the old stuff, but we don't. We're building better factories for more sophisticated technology. Factories are tools and they've improved just the same as every other tool. Their complexity has increased immensely. Sure, nowadays it still takes less effort to build the factory, but all the things that the factory makes needs a lot more work. Scientists, engineers, software developers, lawyers, PR people etc.

I think almost all businesses are going to remain unautomated. Sure, significant parts of the processes will be automated, but not everything. Complexity will keep increasing and we'll likely still need humans to coordinate, because we're not very good at automating the unknown.

That up-front cost is again, a percent of what the factory floor used to employ. And they're mostly used once at the beginning.

To support a model of "build new factories forever" requires endless expansion. The world is no longer expanding at a rate that would support that, not nearly. And I don't see that as a desirable world .

We are close to factories that grow food with indoor vertical farming: https://www.plenty.ag/

Any repetitive job can eventually be automated away.

The largest impact is going to be fully autonomous self driving cars. That alone has the chance of eliminating 4 million driving jobs, including truckers and cab drivers. This does not factor in the ~3 million people that drive for Uber and lyft.

These are not people who are going to be able to easily switch to another position. Even fast food is exploring automating their restaurants. As far as building the factories, procuring raw materials, etc. all those jobs already exist and are staffed. With the constant advancement in 3d printing, even those jobs may be reduced.

The target near me used to regularly have 10+ registers open, now it generally has 3 plus 6 self checkout lines.

I think the other side of this coin is particularly glaring as well.

Since we decided to blame those workless people, and punish them if they don’t find work. They _have_ to find work. Which means more competition for consumption, you _have_ to consume their stuff to keep them fed. Which means more senseless competition to produce shit no one actual my need, more ads, more tele marketing, poisonous food, exploiting of addictive behavior, more jealously guarded trade secrets and “intellectual property” walls instead of cooperation and peer production.

In essense by insisting that all people must be employed at all time, we force the market to produce anti-value.

Absolutely. The current crisis drives your point home. We forcing workers to go to work and expose themselves, if they refuse, they are fired and ineligible for unemployment. They are forced to martyr themselves for the a system designed to efficiently move resources from the bottom to the top. We have somehow convinced people that making other people rich while we toil our lives away is good.

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

― Ronald Wright

Your example of farms is rather poorly put. Modern farms (thinking of corn and wheat and other staple crops) cover hundreds of acres and are managed by 4-5 people. Farms of this size couldn't exist in the past because they required too large of a workforce.

And, given the current state of automation, most of the work to maintain those farms is highly automated; the operators are mostly monitoring screens from non-integrated screens and acting as a simple PID controller.

Where did all of those thousands of previously employed farm hands go? Into the factories. But as they're pushed out of the factories, where do they go next?

Agreed.

Except up your estimate by an order of magnitude or three. Farms of 10,000 acres managed by a handful of people. John Deere estimates 100M acres under automated tillage today, worldwide.

I would say a huge proportion is also caused by moving manufacturing jobs to cheaper countries. It is not just automation.

Yes, but they're returning now. When a business grows to the point they can swallow the cost of automation, they 'bring it back to America' and automate.

> "And what's left is being automated as fast as humanly possible."

More likely, the low hanging fruit of automation has already been plucked bare and the rest will require a century or more to figure out. I certainly don't expect an automated plumber or meat processing worker anytime soon.

They get smarter every year. As I've posted before, my niece and nephew are automation engineers, moving from plant to plant like migrant workers, automating the hell out of everything and anything.

It's not a case of 'can we'. Its only limited by the cost, which is a fixed upfront value. If the market is big enough, then that cost can be amortized. As America grows, more and more processes are entering the magic size where automation pays.

When somebody says they "Brought the factories and jobs back to America!" they're lying. They brought the factory back, but only because automation-at-home is cheaper than hand-labor-overseas.

Fully autonomous vehicles could very easily remove the need for 4 million trucking and taxi jobs as well as affect another 3 million uber / lyft drivers. That technology is not a hundred years away.

> There's only 13M factory workers left in America vs 20M+ in the 70's,

How much of that is due to automation vs. factory jobs being done outside the US?

No idea. But the trend (avalanche) is to bring them back and automate. That's what we prepare for.

I'm interested to learn more about this trend. I imagine it would accelerate in the current situation. Are there any data sources about this?

> Most things are automated now. There's only 13M factory workers left in America vs 20M+ in the 70's, and population has doubled since then.

You're mistaking automation for outsourcing. The factory workers are still around, only they're in China now. Yes, we've automated some things but we're building other stuff now. Much like, yes, we have power tools today, but we're also not only building simple, uninsulated houses.

Dream your utopia, but don't forget that real people still do 14 hour shifts to supply you with the goods you desire, not some highly automated robot in some hidden factory under the streets of your city. It's just that most of these people are n ocean away now, so you don't need to see them and get your happy life disturbed by seeing their living conditions compared to yours.

The goods pour out of the factories, the power is generated by the the wall outlet, the internet lives in the cable and water flows directly from the tap. The magical world of tomorrow. I know, I know, "some day it will all be automated, just you wait". Yeah, let's wait until that's actually in sight and not just hidden away behind a tiny robot moving the product the last 500 feet to your door. It isn't in sight today and it won't be tomorrow.

Categorically wrong. Its being automated now, at a tremendous rate, and has been going on for decades.

Even China is automating. China is the US's #1 market for industrial automation machinery. They're behind us, but gaining fast. They're at about the 25% level now, and increasing.

Try googling around before making spurious, wrong comments please.

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