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Comment by gremlinsinc | Hacker News Reader

you don't have to be a digital nomad. We've been living in a rural'ish city (Cedar city, UT), that isn't a tech hub for awhile now. I'm a freelance dev (underpaid probably $40/hr).

But, I like living wherever I want, and not having to move. Plus wife's family is nearby which comes in handy.

I think one big thing though about the have-nots divide increasing is this is going to speed up automation unlike anything we've seen before. Walmart is already testing getting rid of cashiers completely.

Remote work I think (and hope) will end the big cities / tech hubs and make people move further and further out and be more rural, and keep remote working growing..

View on HN

Check out Robin Hanson's Twitter. His hobby horse recently has been finding _any_ evidence that total employment is affected by recent automation and he's not really finding any.

How about stagnant and declining real wages and decreasing income security for most people?

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

When in SE Asia, it's common to see 20 staff in a store the size of a 7-11, while here it's one or two. (Note that most are unpaid interns, but then I'm the only customer.)

So the US has already minimized the number of unskilled staff relative to some other countries.

Ironically, tech companies often have a shadow engineering organization of 10 or more customer service engineers per company sitting around waiting for an email to help onboard a new client.

Sure, there's always more work to be done.

Technological progress in production, like automation, reduces the proportional costs of labor, thereby accelerating inequity.

Because surplus (profit), not siphoned by management, goes to the investors (providers of capital).

This has always been true.

Some notable exceptions are profit sharing arrangements, like early Walmart, Microsoft, etc.

(Edit: Toyota too. They explicitly reward Labor for productivity improvements. I don't know if that's still true, generally. More recently, Haier has their own unique strategy for innovation and empowering labor. I'm super keen to learn more about them. I have no idea if they share the surplus more fairly. Of course, co-ops explicitly share the surplus; can't believe I forgot about them.)

Seems to me that everyone, everyone, is determined to not see the pink elephant sitting in the living room.

Paul Krugman is maybe closest, with his theory that "job stealing robots" is a convenient cover story for decline of Labor.

Like how Big Timber deflected blame for job losses onto the spotted owl away from automation.

Removing cashiers and automating checkouts just frees up the staff to focus on other in-store work. But the biggest benefit is higher throughput for checkouts. Self service checkouts or automated checkouts free up space for more such counters.

> Removing cashiers and automating checkouts just frees up the staff to focus on other in-store work.

The supermarkets are functioning fine which leads me to think that there isn't a whole lot of other in-store work waiting to be done if only more staff were free to do it. Automating the checkouts just reduces the levels of staff that you need.

store pickup items is one way. and some can do their own small delivery

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