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How is it that people don't at least wonder why cars...haven't lead to mass systemic unemployment...

They have. At one time, there were millions of horses employed in the transportation sector. As technology advanced, they were unable to retrain in other fields because no matter how bright, a horse is fundamentally not as useful as a car. This hasn't happened for humans yet. That doesn't mean it never will.

Technology is improving. People are not. The fact that an increasing line has not yet crossed a flat line is not evidence it never will.

For contemporary economists (e.g. Adam Smith), transportation horses were capital, not labor.

Your reply misses the point. Regardless of how horses were classified, there came a point where 99% of what a horse can do could be done better, faster, and cheaper by a machine.

What happens when we develop technology which can do 99% of what a human can do better, faster, and cheaper?

With previous innovations, there was always something else that a displaced human worker could find to do. What happens when 99% of human jobs are gone?

>Your reply misses the point.

No it doesn't. Capital becomes obsolescent, labor does not.

>What happens when we develop technology which can do 99% of what a human can do better, faster, and cheaper?

During 99% of recorded history, agricultural labor was the prevailing definition of "what a human can do".

Labor has not yet become obsolete. That doesn't mean it can't.

I'm not talking about the prevailing definition of what a human can do. I'm talking about the actual fact of what a human can do.

You still haven't addressed the question of what will happen when nearly everything which a human being is capable of can be done better by a machine.

Labor does not become obsolete. Inefficient capital is discarded, but less efficient labor is always useful to some degree, because of comparative advantage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Example_1).

This holds even for the scenario of AI becoming a very close substitute for humans. The economic pressure, however, is to develop AI in directions that are complementary to human abilities.

We call them children and move on.

You making a distinction between labor and capital which does not exist. Contemporary economists view both labor and capital as inputs to production. If Input A and Input B are substitutes, then producers will choose the cheaper one.

I've never heard of any well-known economist arguing labor and capital are the same; got any reference? While labor and capital are indeed factors of production, they are quite distinct. Capital is the accretion of past labor and serves to augment the effects of the current.

If and when the robot dream is finally realized, it would be novel insofar as it involves the unprecedented production of laborers through an economic process. The debate over the effects of bringing new workers into the economy has, however, been played out many times. (E.g. regarding cheap robots for unskilled work cf. Chinese immigration in the 19th century.)

I've never heard of any well-known economist arguing labor and capital are the same; got any reference?

I'm not sure why you ask me for a reference for a claim I didn't make. I claimed that labor and capital are substitutes as inputs to production. I also claimed that an inferior or more expensive substitute may go unused when a better alternative becomes available.

Do you disagree with any of these claims?

Regardless of whether we apply the post-fact label "capital" or "labor", the point that a species can become no longer useful and that we have precedent for this phenomenon is still both valid and scary.

Your argument is the common objection to this idea and it's all well and good up to the part where you say that technology only creates frictional unemployment "as people re-train". Here's the problem as I see it. Technology is advancing, rapidly, to the point that humans are not able to compete in a general sense and in a number of fields.

If you're edged out of a job as a human it's getting more and more difficult to re-train. If it were easy to re-train in a lot of cases it would be automated already.

Ok let's say they don't re-train. Let's say they just go out and try to find a job as phone sales people (yes, every single person replaced by technology decides to become a sales rep. Bare with me.)

What would that do?

It would drive down the salaries of sales reps by 2%. That's it. That's the magic of the market economy. That money saved by replacing people with software goes back into the economy and creates demand for more goods (which needs to be pushed by sales reps, for example.)

And by the way, I would argue that electrification and the industrial revolution were far more disruptive (and happened damn fast) than online shopping and bookkeeping software.

>> Technology is advancing, rapidly, to the point that humans are not able to compete in a general sense and in a number of fields. If you're edged out of a job as a human it's getting more and more difficult to re-train.

> Ok let's say they don't re-train. Let's say they just go out and try to find a job as

No, the point is what if: 1) The easy to do and train for jobs are all automated away. 2) The available jobs require PhD level expertise to do.

If I've studied for 8 years to get my quantum physics PhD to get my job as a technician at Quantum World, then it's going to be damn hard to retrain for 8 more years to get a PhD in Natural Language Processing to work phone support at AutonomaTech.

People are becoming increasingly specialized. If automation eliminates the easy to learn jobs, it gets harder to jump from one specialization to another.

Jobs won't be hard to automate because they require superior abstract intelligence. The machines will have covered that pretty soon.

Some will be hard to automate, because they are fuzzy and depend on interacting with human beings.

It's harder for a robot to cut your hair and put on make up like you direct it to, than to play chess.

That just moves the problem into the future. What happens when we can build a machine with the mental abilities of a human being for the price of a supercomputer? Then what happens when it falls to the price of a smartphone?

But a lot of companies don't need phone sales representatives anymore. They can do nearly the same thing with Adwords account and a decent landing page. Both of which can be setup for less than a days pay of a phone representative.

Pick another position that scales with production or demand and you'll invariably find similar automation that has been introduced in the past ten years.

As I look around, I see mass, systemic unemployment taking hold.

This ever increasing march of technology may result in more goods being created, but due to the nature of our capitalist society, it tends to pool the capital in those who have capital to begin with.

The huge disparity between the rich and the poor in the US is not due to "technology" but it is not being helped by it either.

Technology creates efficiencies, but there is no natural way for those efficiencies to benefit those whom it puts out of work.

"As I look around, I see mass, systemic unemployment taking hold."

Only because we are paying people to not work, and because fair pay is illegal under a certain rate. Consequence is that work worth less than minimum wage cannot, by law, be given to people - and so automation moves in.

Stop paying people to not work and they'll find or make work. (There is a difference between a safety net and making lack of arbitrary wealth illegal.)

And "the poor", for most practical purposes, does not exist in the US. If you are living on more - a lot more - than the world median income, if you are flushing your toilet with drinking water, if you have a TV & car & cell phone & AC & thermostat heating & >1000 sq ft housing & ..., if you have over $1/meal/person/day[1], and etc you're not poor.

[1] - http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com

You're forgetting that many of the people who have those things you describe can only actually 'afford' them in the US because of cheap credit. If they were to sell all those things at the price they bought them, they would still be in debt, and thus are, in fact, poor.

Cheap credit is a luxury. You're ignoring a host of mitigating factors.

If your choice is 850 days of food vs. a TV, and you opt for the TV, you're not poor. (Derived from [1] above.) With over two years of energy literally under your belt, paying off that cheap loan and earning far more, even under adverse conditions, leverages you well outside poverty.

"Poor on paper" is unconvincing, given the opportunity for wise choices.

What if traditional brick-and-mortars business eventually turn to business models we frequently see on the web? What if robots drive costs down so low that you can have free hamburgers sponsored by some luxury product? Once you cut down human labor costs entirely, all that is left is natural resources costs. I'm just throwing out some ideas, perhaps someone with a better understanding of economics can elaborate or criticize...

"free hamburgers...luxury product"

Noblesse Obese

It seems likely to me that for today, the mass unemployment is more likely a result of failures in the economic policy arena. Automation simply hasn't advanced far enough yet, there are still far too many human-only jobs for the technology argument to fly. We don't really need wild explanations to explain where we are today, rather simple business cycle theory can take a pretty good run at explaining it. (I even saw people using business cycle theory to predict it in advance, including the fact that we've still got years of a down economy to go through yet.)

I really don't expect mass unemployment due to technology to be a problem until we get a lot more jobs disappearing to robotics. When you see a purely-robotic McDonalds, start wondering.

Try moving to a different country.

The history of the world is full of catastrophes, devastating wars, famines and so on. In the "first world" we seem pretty shielded from that at the moment, but I don't think we are really safe. A lot of big, cosy empires have faltered before our time.

Some of those wars might well have been the result of changing economics.

See my reply to PG saying the same thing at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2851797

It depends on whether the amount of work available is constrained by the demand for goods or by the supply of raw materials. In the past, we've answered automation by increasing the rate at which we produce goods and, hence, consume raw materials. Just because we've always been able to do that doesn't mean we should assume we always will.