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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

> this gets little attention from investors who believe “AI is the future,” encouraging further automation. This has contributed to the hollowing out of the economy

Automation == "hollowing out of the economy" does not follow. Companies can use automation to grow their output while keeping their workforce intact by taking on new projects that were not previously possible.

If automation were that dangerous, then being a software developer should be the worst job because it automates itself away. But no, in reality we do more and still need even more devs.

On the other hand, not automating is wasteful and a future time bomb. This anti-automation rhetoric is like children hating school while their parents force them to attend - preferring short term ease that comes with a much bigger long term penalty (temporal discounting at work).

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Your argument doesn’t follow. How would being a software developer be the worst job because they “automate their own work away” when in fact they’d have a job until they automated everyone’s work away? It’s likely a given developer would reach retirement before that happens. Meanwhile tons of other people are out of a job.

I think the point is that software automation tools (automatic testing, nice IDEs) generally don't lead to companies hiring fewer devs, it leads to companies being able to do more with the same number of devs and consequently hiring more. Same thing in construction or any globally competitive industry

Point being that software developers automate away their own manual tasks (and even entire jobs) faster than they automate anything else.

Has anyone actually convincingly argued that automation reduces the net number of jobs over time? My impression is that this belief entails a kind of parochialism about job loss, i.e., that it merely tracks the specific kinds or manifestations of jobs that automation has rendered obsolete while ignoring either the fact that particular occupations remain but now make use of new, more sophisticated methods, or the new jobs created by the needs and complexities introduced by new technologies.

Think of our ancestors. How many occupations were there? Arguably fewer than we have today. Certainly, your great grandmother had to wash the dishes herself, but we didn't have factory workers at dishwasher manufacturing plants, dishwasher repairmen, dishwasher dealers, and so on. With the introduction of the dishwasher, there is a reduced need for human dishwashers, but the technology also introduced a whole new industry in its place to support it.

I almost want to say that some law of conservation or even entropy is observed. We are exchanging one kind of burden for another or potentially many.

It seems like there is no convincing argument to the contrary either.

I see people propose this kind of ‘law of conservation’.

It would be nice if that were a real law, but the only arguments I’ve seen in its favor have been inductive ones covering the last few hundred years.

There is also something a bit odd in my mind about looking at human existence in terms of needed occupations.

Isn’t the entire point of technology to eliminate work?

> It seems like there is no convincing argument to the contrary either.

That jobs are created seems to me to be more convincing, but I leave that as a matter of opinion substantiated only to the degree that I have in my OP.

> There is also something a bit odd in my mind about looking at human existence in terms of needed occupations. > Isn’t the entire point of technology to eliminate work?

From a certain point of view, yes. Economically valuable work is only needed to the degree that it costs something to attain a (licit) good and to the degree that the good is desired by someone else. If those desires could be satisfied without cost, no real opportunity for a market exists because no need for exchange exists. But I cannot imagine that that situation could ever obtain. And therefore, because it could never obtain, the only thing most people can exchange for a desired good is something obtained through the exchange of labor for capital. So it's a bit moot since labor appears endemic to the human condition.

I just don't see why automation of one thing necessarily means a net loss of jobs. If anything, automation entails complex technology and complex technology, among other things, requires labor to produce and to maintain.

“Labor seems endemic to the human condition”

Firstly, this is contestable, and secondly it creates a tautology.

But also - consider that that humans have cognitive and physical limits.

Even if there is in principle always new opportunity created by automation, which I do find plausible, I see no logic supporting the idea that these new opportunities would necessarily be widely addressable by the majority of humans.

> Firstly, this is contestable, and secondly it creates a tautology.

I didn't say it was incontestable. I only said that it seems to be the case and that the evidence seems to favor that opinion. It would be more interesting to hear why you think it is contestable. Also, I'm not sure how this is tautological.

> But also - consider that that humans have cognitive and physical limits.

If anything, that would seem to suggest that these impose a bound on how much we can automate. Arguably, this means an upper bound would be determined by the maintainability of such technologies.

> Even if there is in principle always new opportunity created by automation, which I do find plausible, I see no logic supporting the idea that these new opportunities would necessarily be widely addressable by the majority of humans.

If you are making that claim on the basis of cognitive limitations, then see my previous point. But by the same token, if cognitive limitations impose a limit, then it would seem to suggest that the problem space would require a greater division of labor in order to render it tractable.

“If anything, that would seem to suggest that these impose a bound on how much we can automate.”

Why would this be?

All automation is now built on top of already automated processes.

The level of automation we can achieve isn’t obviously bounded by human cognitive limits.

The level of human participation certainly is.

I agree.

In fact, automation has been the hallmark of the western world, and in the US in particular.

Labor costs have always been high in the US and automation has been used since the beginning - for hundreds of years.

> Companies can use automation to grow their output while keeping their workforce intact by taking on new projects that were not previously possible.

This idea does not scale. It assumes that there is no upper limit for demand/production, and assumes that a business can suddenly gain the expertise to enter new markets to sell new products. It also assumes that investors would prefer risky reinvestment strategies to cutting costs by reducing labor and increasing short term profits.

> If automation were that dangerous, then being a software developer should be the worst job because it automates itself away

Automation goes after the easiest targets first. IT is still growing because it is an immature profession, and a platform for automation itself. I remember IT in the late 90s - basically anyone who could operate a computer could get a job doing installs. In fact my first job was adding Trumpet Winsock to machines that didn't have any built-in way to access the internet. A few years later you could still make decent money installing and configuring operating systems. Those jobs are long gone and replaced by SCCM and other similar tools. They have been replaced by jobs that require much more technical skill. Entire teams are replaced every day by outsourcing to automation platforms like AWS, because those platforms can provide the same services with fewer employees.

A better example is farming or manufacturing. Take a look at productivity versus employment since 1900.[1]

> This anti-automation rhetoric is like children hating school while their parents force them to attend - preferring short term ease that comes with a much bigger long term penalty (temporal discounting at work).

No, it's a pretty straightforward recognition that retraining even a few percent of any given workforce every year is going to lead to massive inequality and social problems, especially when there is no infrastructure to provide for living costs while a worker gets retrained. A manufacturing worker can be retrained to a better job, but how long do you think it would take to educate that person so they could design and maintain the machines that replace them? How much would that cost? Who is going to pay for it? And if demand for the product is flat, does it make any sense?

It's also a recognition that we are nearing peak production of practically everything. Developed nations are leveling off and declining in population. Around a third of our food is discarded. Ride-sharing is reducing demand for cars. E-commerce is able to offer discounts because it uses less labor. We are now at the point where major technology vendors have resorted to designing addictive experiences to compete for attention. What's left after that is saturated? I'm almost afraid to ask.

[1] https://www.ncci.com/Articles/Pages/II_Insights_QEB_Impact-A...

Automation certainly doesn’t hollow out the “economy” but it certainly can contribute to wealth inequality by reducing the number of employed humans required to generate value. At the extreme it could permanently upend the concept of full employment in the economy.

But that's a bit of a simple perspective. Not so long ago, a third of the population of Europe were farmers. Do you think that farming automation concentrated all the wealth in the remaining farmers' hands, leaving nothing for anyone else? Or did the resulting plummet in food costs allow us to figure out other jobs that added previously inconceivable value in other areas?

It's a fallacy to assume that the consequences of future automation is going to be just like past automation. There's no reason to assume that there will be new jobs to replace old jobs next time. Because this time it's going to descend on us a lot faster.

This is not a "simple" perspective, and if I'm permitted to be equally offensive, I suggest yours is a naive perspective. After all, this is already beginning to play out in our economies today.

It used to be that being successful meant that you owned the most successful store in your town, and maybe also the three other closest towns. Now, success is judged on a national or even international level. Success is achieved by fewer people at bigger scales. Success then looked like Wal-Mart. And now it looks like Amazon.

Success used to look like a dozen taxi medallions in NYC. Now it looks like Uber.

Do you really think that the "American Dream" will withstand a large fraction of truck drivers, taxi drivers, manufacturing line workers and clerical workers being made forcefully unemployed? You're not seriously suggesting that the answer is to teach truck drivers to code?

There were more humans hired to perform simple calculations prior to the calculator, but we don't see people saying we should get rid of the calculator.

A calculator cannot write a novel or learn to do a new task

There is a fundamental difference between an AGI that can perform any human task and a tool that can only do one task.

So far there has always been something only humans can do, so they get hired. But when the true AGI can do anything, humans are obsolete.

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