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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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