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Comment by epberry | Hacker News Reader

How can you not think this is great? Freeing humans from menial tasks is the way forward. Remember when people (mostly women) would spend hours washing? Machines and automation freed them.

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> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...

The solution isn't less robots. Automation isn't the enemy, poverty is.

Automation solves problems that can be addressed by people in poverty.

Automation funnels that money away from people in poverty to property owners.

There is no support today, nor is any on the horizon, for people poised to be displaced by automation (in the US).

Combine all of these, and you're going to end up with a class of people with an inability to meet their basic needs, and with no support from the government. This historically doesn't end well.

Then those are problems to solve with social policy. Solving poverty by walking technology backwards isn't a solution. Technology is too powerful. Whichever society would be the first to renounce technology would also be the last because everyone else would say "Oh, that's why we like washing machines and self-driving cars".

And let's just say we lived in a unified society somehow. The net suffering of all peoples could only be alleviated by progressing technology forward and proper social policy. Removing one doesn't help solve the problem.

Automation is here. The policies aren't. There's no reasonable policies anywhere on the horizon.

The problem is going to hit us all in the face soon, no matter how much we shout "but social policies will fix it" from the rooftops.

Remove all automation we already have and civilization goes to zero immediately. We already have a ton of automation. And yet, the jobless rate is at record lows, despite the pandemic.

Basic unemployment rates are at 4.6%, which is not an all time low. A 20 year low would be Oct '19, which was 3.5%

Also, if you dig beyond the basic rates (for example, into the "not in the labor force, but want to be"), you will see that it's around 6M, whereas the 20 year low is closer to 4M.

I'm not advocating for removing automation. I'm warning that rolling out the automation of even more jobs is going to cause societal problems. Perhaps I'm hoping the right person will read this and start doing something about it, since I'm not that person.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

The point is it’s not 99%, even though 99% of the population from 100 years ago would be unemployable today due to automation. Technology and culture change each other

Sure, eventually, culture will shift, and new classes of jobs will be created.

But that's not happening right now (see earlier comments about social legislation), and it won't in anything resembling "in time" to prevent more people from losing their jobs with no reasonable replacements (i.e. above-poverty line wages) in sight.

As someone who works flat-out to increase automation every day, I certainly hope the unlucky will be OK, but I am also convinced that they will be

> As someone who works flat-out to increase automation every day, I certainly hope the unlucky will be OK, but I am also convinced that they will be

It's easy to think that our actions have no consequences, or more accurately that "someone else" will take care of the consequences of the actions we take. And the more we say it to ourselves, the more we believe it.

Your central thesis is that more automation = bad, at least in the short term, and should therefore be halted. I've got a problem with that.

- Why is the amount of automation we have good, and more is bad? That's an "I've got mine" approach. You're essentially saying that you're happy with your gadgets (dishwasher et al) and with the current price level and variety of consumer goods and no further improvement is needed.

- Who decides where the line between enough and too much is? A rich Westerner? Or an African without lights, running water, or a washing machine, who works by manually recycling garbage?

- How did we deal with the massive changes automation has already made to society? We're vastly better off now, why shouldn't we continue?

Poverty will be easier to enforce with emotionless robotic cops.

I don't think people are saying fewer robots are the solution. What I hear is words of warning, to be mindful of how the resulting gains and "freedom" are distributed. The goal of is (or at least should be) to reduce suffering, not merely reallocate it.

"__If__ machines produce everything we need..."

People have been asserting that machines imply post scarcity since the communist manifesto in 1848. I am not convinced.

Even if machines produced all goods, that still doesn’t imply post-scarcity. Some things are inherently scarce: front row tickets to a show, reservations at a hot restaurant, or a certifiably original piece of art.

A bowl of rice for a day of labour in the rainforrest sawmill that produced the front row seats.

Exactly. Even in Star Trek, where (almost) anything can be replicated, there are still restaurants that serve home-cooked meals.

From the quote, I read:

"most people can end up miserably poor" == "ever-increasing inequality"

Which begs the question - is the misery of poverty due to the lack of access to important goods or services, or because of the relative wealth standing?

Lack of being needed.

Poor people can't afford to live. This leads to all kinds of shit we should have -as a species - eliminated decades ago; kids with Rickets, parents that skip meals so their kids can eat, foregoing heating so they can eat, working 3 jobs just to pay the rent, having zero healthcare. And that's just in developed countries.

Poor people don't care that they will never own a Ferrari (or even a car newer than 15 years old, ever). They care about the basics, food, water, shelter.

Once we don't have people in developed (and undeveloped) countries living without adequate food or being one bad week or accident away from homelessness we can come back to see if they are just simply jealous.

So if misery of the poor and inequality largely aren't the same, there might be a path where inequality increases while the quality of life of the poor also increases?

Globally, at least, we appear to be well along that path. The number of people living in extreme poverty has declined precipitously over the last few decades [0].

Philosophically, why is inequality an inherently bad thing? If the poorest among us universally had the standard of living of today’s millionaires, why should we be bothered by the existence of trillionaires or quadrillionaires?

For me, it comes to a differential in political power. The greater the magnitude of inequality, the easier it is for the quadrillionaires to put the plebeian millionaires back into abject poverty.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

> Philosophically, why is inequality an inherently bad thing?

As you said, it's because money begets control of other people's lives. If the only thing you could do with money is live in luxury, then hardly anyone would care about it but wealth can be used to:

1. Ensure your plans never fail because you continually inject money into the equation. And by that ensure that other peoples plans always fail because they run out of money first. 2. Stymie actions and actors that you dislike. (and revenge on your enemies) 3. Materially, improve the lives of your children.

Manna[1] is a good short story that talks about these two potential futures. I agree that in particular, it seems more likely that the unemployment welfare hellscape might be more likely, unfortunately.

1. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

It really depends on who owns the robots. As it is now, the richer you are the more robots you'll be able to afford and the less labor you'll need. When labor isn't in demand anymore and most people don't have robots, then most people won't have income anymore, forcing them into poverty and revolution. Robot police and military could make successful revolution impossible.

I think robots will follow a pattern similar to cars, tv's, kitchen machines, computers and such. First only a few can afford them, but in time prices come down and functionality goes up.

Capture them, hack them and re-program them...

Did that happen when washing machines became available?

Everyone owns washing machines now - people just move on to do other things

Washing machines didn't eliminate all demand for labor. It was pretty niche like most applications so far. And yeah, most of the world still doesn't have them, so those positive feedback loops have been there the whole time.

And if your town doesn’t have washing machines, they sure as heck aren’t going to have 100x more expensive robots

Robots are just portable computers with hands. They will not eliminate all demand for labor anytime soon.

while living in a small apartment long ago, I had to give my weekly laundry to someone in the neighborhood who owned many many laundry robots

to their credit, they charged an incredibly fair price, and even folded

it's not even about that.

any large scale, long running space colonies will need huge effort of robots that don't mind the hostile environment, without much much more advanced robots space colonization is a dream and so the end of life as we know it is certain (just wait for a big enough asteroid or a near supernova).

Since automation, almost everything has become lower quality. There's a reason why "handmade" is better.

My washing machine does a lot better job than I could. My oven is much more reliable at heating than I am at building campfires. My computer is much quicker at maths than I am. My TV is cheaper than going to the theatre.

Automation is great when it works well, we just forget about it when it does, so we generally only recognise the bad.

Perhaps, but your dishwasher is probably not be better than a person dedicated to washing dishes.

My dishwasher often leaves dirty spots and stripes, which would easily be noticed and removed by a dedicated person.

It's orders of magnitude cheaper though, and most people would accept a >90% good enough job for <1% of the price.

Also I recommend the Technology Connections videos on how dishwashers work. Most people are probably not using them correctly for optimal results.

Good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04

TLDW: Stop using detergent packs, start using the pre-wash bin.

I saw this but had a huge box of soap packs. So I started putting one in the prewash thingy and two more soap packs in the main section.

Now it cleans shockingly well.

Mine doesn't.

Try using multiple soap packets and rinse-aid. Works wonders.

Good thing we have mostly automated production of soap packs, so they’re cheap, plentiful, and almost as good as the handmade ones our caveman ancestors used

I really want to shout out Maytag for pushing woman's rights forward. Without all that haphazard laundry out of the way, they never would've garnered equal pay or saw themselves as equal in the workplace.

Please.

To think there are only positives in this change is a naive approach of the future. Sure, there will be some benefits but we are in for a world of hurt if we maintain our current social structures (at least in the US) and decimate the working population.

With all that haphazard laundry in the way, they would never have even found themselves in a workplace.

Have you ever done laundry by hand? My grandmother did. It took literally an entire day of scrubbing.

> we are in for a world of hurt if we maintain our current social structures and decimate the working population.

History has shown that maintaining the status quo until everyone's in a world of hurt is the standard approach.

Two reductive takes do not a complex one make.

Labor saving home appliances, changes in family size, and convenience foods are a pretty big deal for how people of any gender spend their time. Time spent cleaning has decreased, and been replaced with other activities. Parenting has changed a lot and become much more intensive. One did not cause the other, but our modern lives absolutely co-evolved with appliances.

https://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/hours-spent-homemaking-hav...

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