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Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

Automation happens not where many expect it (including the media). It is frequently expected that automation will come as replacement for humans, while it actually is coming in the form of better tooling and assistance to humans. This theoretically should be reflected in work productivity, not in employment numbers.

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This is true, but better tooled, equipped humans do more work and so you need fewer of them.

When your landscaping company buys an excavator, one person can now move as much earth as 15 people used to. You don't keep the other 14 on the payroll.

What I've seen is that the competitor buys the excavator and the 15 people have to do the work for similar pay. The salaries go down, amount of work per worker goes up and the competitor makes exotic profits.

I've seen one fascinating example where pay per unit eventually boiled down to 40 cents per hour. That was the point where the automatons simply could no longer keep up. Some would decline to do the manual work. Those who did got the less frequent better paid contracts that paid up to 20 euro per hour. (for which no machine exists)

A larger amount of people can now afford landscaping services because earth moving cost have now gone down. Poor people used to go barefoot before industrialization.

Producing more with less human input is how we raise the living standards of everyone in the long term.

The Jevons paradox absolutely does play a part, especially at first, but I don't believe it's enough for higher efficiency to result in an overall win (edit: for the employees). Most markets saturate surprisingly quickly when you apply 10x - 100x efficiency increases.

You see this in factories as well.

Not pure 'automation' but rather 1 person overseeing several lightly automated processes.

So while 25 years ago you had 4 Operators doing 4 tasks together, you now have 1 Operator doing the 4 tasks with automated assistance.

Also often this person will make less than his individual 4 predecessors due to 'Tiered' wage systems. While being more physically(previous operators taking turns doing physical tasks, etc) and now mentally exhausted(ensuring process is correct) than them as well.

It should be noted that as efficiency increases, the company can compete and lower prices, meaning people don't _have to_ go to work as much to achieve the same level of living.

Provided there is competition

Right - and we have enough capacity / productivity now to feed, clothe and shelter the global population. The challenge is really how to distribute resources in a "fair" way whilst incentivizing growth in productivity to keep increasing quality of life for all.

The challenge is to get people to even consider it. In reality it is not hard to pay people to follow courses, pay people to tutor/helpdesk or pay people to be available when they are needed.

Imagine a gig economy where 100 employees are on call the year round, ready to jump in when you need them for as long as you need them, complete with training to make this absurd level of scaling possible. We could do a kind of fire drill to test your corporate scale-ability. Then we get valuable information: Your corp atm make 100 widgets per day but you can scale to 50 000 in 2 weeks.

That sounds like a terrible job for the temp employees

One would just get a normal salary that goes up and down depending on training, market conditions, health and fitness. (the later 2 to some minimal extend)

In stead of a skill and experience starved pool to hire from it is redefined as a national asset. We monitor its market value and print money against it.

Since we/you/one/I want to feed, house and cloth everyone anyway we may coin a separate (freely exchangeable) currency for necessities and expire it after n months.

Just discarding people the way we do now quickly turns them from profitable & productive sources of tax revenue into expensive nuances. Having your head on the chopping block the year round with the sword hovering over it inspires a kind of productivity we no longer need. In the current economic situation we need people to maintain and grow their natural ability to think and learn. Similarly, people running businesses shouldn't have to fill their head with that horror nonsense either. They have better things to do for us. (things that they are actually good at)

Yep. Except that instilling and maintaining institutional knowledge in an employee represents a sunk cost, which means the fewer employees you need for a job, the less it costs, even if the actual number of hours spent doing the job is the same. This is why instead of everybody working 3-day work weeks, we have 40% of people underemployed or unemployed and 60% of people being worked to death.

Companies can spend unlimited on advertising, marketting (including social media manipulation), regulatory compliance and lobbying.

These areas have grown hugely, eating up all the gains, and will continue to eat all the gains so that the number of work hours needed is constant.

when people talk of automation they mean replacement, not just better tools, for that has been happening since the beginning of time

When 9 people can do the work of 10, the 10th person often finds themselves out of a job. It’s little different if your job type completely disappears or if the economy only needs half as many people doing your job, either way many people need a new type of job.

That's what the media has been screaming all these years. The reality is often that the 10th person has their role change, they retire off or (as in the case of the engraving industry), people end up buying more at a cheaper price.

Someone having their role change sounds fine, but it often means a skill and thus a longer term salary reset. Individually people may be better or worse off, but generally if you have 20+ years of experience doing something starting over is a major setback.

Granted for very slow transitions it’s not as big of a deal.

The one situation where I remember this happening specifically (when the BBC made footage archiving digital), they planned the automation rollout to coincide with retiring off the old analog librarians.

Then they hired them back out of retirement because the project went badly wrong.

The latter part went awry (although I think they didn't mind too much) but the timing kind of worked out.

In a more vicious corporation they probably wouldn't have been so bothered about the timing of the rollout.

Right. How many people would Google actually require to keep employed to keep their current business running, with capacity to serve the entire ad market of humanity? That's the level of automation we are dealing with, not some machine that prints more phonebooks per man-hour.

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