Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

I know that the suggestion that these are going to eliminate human positions is an unpopular sentiment here at HN because economics. However, are we really so sure that there will always be a human labor demand to effectively meet the human labor supply?

What do we do when there is an excess of human labor? Everyone here is opposed to make work for good reason. But a suggestion that solves the moral issue of what to do with an unemployed human who is not contributing due to a lack of labor demand has not been proposed in the general case. It is typically waved away by saying, "There will be a new industry." But can we really not imagine that this new industry will remain un-automated for long? What about the new industry that begins by being automated?

I am not opposed to automation in the slightest. I think that if we can automate every task in the world, that would be the best thing. If anything I am just opposed to insisting that as technology changes, we must maintain the same social values and behaviors.

New industry will be service-orientated. Even if robot cooks can make a better pizza, people will tell themselves that human-made ones are more individual, and taste better.

As the price of human labor goes to zero, humans will be increasingly used as marketing props.

In a democracy or socialist state, handouts or negative taxation will redistribute wealth.

What evidence do we have that handout are increasing with the recent increase in automation? My sense is they're going in the opposite direction and have strong momentum.

And I will tell you that few people will chose human made pizzas just for the experience, especially if their wages are going to zero.

I hope you realise that if you look at the numbers it's unlikely that the people who are making the human-made pizzas will earn enough to pay for human-made pizza.

It's like there is a a pyramid of salaries and we just have to admit that we're trimming bits off the bottom of the pyramid. (IMHO)

Services like tourism and healthcare are in growing demand, however there is a shift going on there, too, e.g. airbnb, innovative medical devices etc. Unfortunately, an expensive services sector cannot sustain an economy on its own. It works in rich countries where people can afford to spend the money they make on other sectors for premium products and services. The issue of how to avoid unemployment and "keep people busy" in a socially fair way will be an active discussion in the following years.

What do we do when there is an excess of human labor?

We get to work building some really awesome space ships and start colonizing other planets. Seriously.

USA seems to have an excess of human labour and they're scaling back the space program in favour of private enterprise. From what I see of the private enterprise is that not much is happening as they seek those specialised in certain skills.

You could put faith in several people groups like Copenhagen Suborbitals, CSTART, OSM and the like, but like above they seek those specialised in certain skills.

That's to discount the paradox of technology efficiency: Food becomes cheaper but unemployed people can't pay for it.

The unemployed people are uneducated and unable to make space ships.

The educated and skilled people will be busy working on military tech, farmville, and face recognition software. You know, technologies aimed at pacifying the masses.

I would love to see a more accessible version of Mechanical Turk that a broader range of people could use. Maybe something in a kiosk format that could be put in low income neighborhoods. Even the most uneducated can answer a question like "Is there a person in this picture?", and anyone could earn money for a meal for several hours of work.

I'm sure there are several other examples of new types of low level employment that will arise as automation increases. In a world where everything is automated, there is no such thing as "too much training data".

May be the future will be like Wall-e movie. Where humans do no work at all (even walking).

May the robot overloads find a solution to our growing fat problem.

The 40 hour work week is a relic of the industrial age, right? Things are different today, and the technology sector is a good example: top talent produces a disproportionately large amount of work, while there are practically very few "menial" positions that could be filled in with low skilled employees. Maybe we should expect this to become a much more common pattern in the future; once construction workers, waiters, window cleaners, drivers get replaced with robots we are left with a sizeable population of unemployable people. Maybe a revival of agriculture or sth will absorb those people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com