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Comment by littlegiantcap | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely loathe these arguments.

The economy is not a zero sum game! When I gain a dollar another person doesn't inherently lose one. We build wealth, and while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate. For this argument to hold any sort of water we would still be fretting over what to do with all the unemployed candle makers after the advent of electricity. The answer isn't to move backwards, or as the author suggest to promote inefficiency, but to use our creativity to move forward. The world has plenty of problems that need fixing, and as long as there are problems with the world, and there always will be, and as long as we as a society and a planet continue to strive to make tomorrow better than the day before it, we will continue to innovate and create jobs.

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"while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate."

Oh yeah? Prove it. (Hint: when you do, you should wait patiently for your Nobel, because you'll have earned it. You're re-stating a very popular theory, but that popularity doesn't make the theory a fact.)

The problem that I have with the "innovation" canard is that it inherently assumes equality of potential for every worker in the labor force: we don't have much room for unintelligent people in our society if you now have to "innovate" just to get a job. Most people can't innovate, and never will.

Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man: thus far through our history, we've been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory labor, factory labor to "service" work, etc.) But that era appears to be coming to an end. In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom X% of intelligence, we don't automatically get more innovation -- we just get structurally unemployed people.

The anti-luddite argument is actually an argument in favor of social darwinism.

When people say that the jobs will shift to other sectors, they are really saying that an elite few will control all the wealth and if you can't appeal to their self-interest you are expendable.

The elite few who control all the wealth right now are not even spending or investing their money. They are just sitting on it. Because they'd rather have the money tomorrow than the services of the poor today. This is another way of saying that the current world's poor are expendable to the elite.

I don't see this mindset changing any time soon. All logic indicates that the world's poor are going to starve to death in their ghettos while the elite technologists sit on their money piles -- money piles defended by predator drones and LDAP.

By the way when I said LDAP I actually meant LRAD. But LDAP does make a bit of sense too. :)

I don't view my candle maker argument as a straw man rather than an example. I could provide more examples starting at the industrial revolution moving forward, and I assure you there are countless, which would by definition make it not a straw man argument because I'm not misrepresenting anyone's position nor am I cherry picking 1 instance to prove my own argument.

As far as you're argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water, which I don't believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don't necessarily need to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are countless of other examples in almost every field.

Finally, I can't prove it. I'm not a professional economist, I don't have the background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject. What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people.

The difference between now and the past is the nature of military and crowd control technology.

In the industrial revolution the luddites smashed the machines and threatened the elite with guillotines and Marxism. They could do this because guns were cheap and plentiful, and a group of men could be made into an army no matter how poor they were.

In response, the elite created social programs that would help the poor to become economically useful, and the elite would also pay the poor to join the military and conquer other nations, for profit.

Today, the elite's technological military superiority totally eclipses a mob of unemployed men. A group of angry poor can't even smash windows unmolested anymore, let alone break into corporate headquarters or private estates. Police are sophisticated crowd controllers who make use of psychological and non-lethal warfare that not only dominates but also pacifies.

It's not that new jobs won't be created. It's that the poor have nothing to offer to the rich, and so the poor are expendable, and the poor have no power, and so the poor are allowed to die.

> "I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. "

Having worked in a factory before with everyone from managers, engineers, machinists, and line workers... I think you give people too much credit.

It may sound elitist, or depressing, but for many people in this world there is no hope of them occupying an intellectual job. Either through sheer genetic lottery, nurture (or lack thereof), there are an awful lot of people with not the education or intelligence to become creative innovators.

> "A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people."

A military aviator requires hundreds, if not thousands of hours of training time, and if you've ever met one, you'd realize that they're sharp as a tack. Aviators are probably some friggin' smart people - I do not believe they are at all a good, representative sample of the rest of the population, large segments of which cannot do anything but low-skill labor - and can never be fully retrained to perform as creative/intellectual job types.

Perhaps their children can, but these people, alive and needing jobs right now, are fucked for life.

> "What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people."

That's OP's point - we are at a turning point where, perhaps, these rules no longer apply. The majority of the world has historically been employed in agriculture or unskilled industrial labor. When we invented the car, carriage makers went out of work - but more unskilled jobs popped up in its place. When the cotton gin was invented, wide swathes of people went out of work - but there was demand for unskilled labor elsewhere. There may be periods of pain and unemployment, but ultimately the majority of these eliminated folk found other, low-skill jobs elsewhere.

We are at the first point in history now where we are eliminated unskilled work, but not replacing them with anything other unskilled labor, in any sector. If there's a Wal-Mart greeter created for every factory job lost in the USA, we might be ok, but there really isn't. And the greatest problem is that the gap between an unskilled laborer vs. a creative service-sector "innovator" is so disparate, that no possibility for retraining exists for the vast majority of the recently-made-redundant.

Also it's worth pointing out that even low skill service sector jobs typically only have employment for rigid demographics. When that sexy young waitress turns 30 her earning potential plummets and they really don't want her back. They want another 22 year old. What does that waitress expect to be doing when she is 55? Where does her value come from? What will her pension look like?

There is going to be a huge glut of unskilled poor living like animals in ghettos. It's going to be a humanitarian crisis of a 3rd world calibre.

> "There is going to be a huge glut of unskilled poor living like animals in ghettos. It's going to be a humanitarian crisis of a 3rd world calibre."

It's depressing and hard to accept, but I think this is the way it'll go down.

The sexy young waitress can, with some training, take on other low-skill labor jobs. A hit to earnings? Perhaps, but livable in the old days.

This has been the story for the unskilled labor class for decades - industries rise and fall, but when training is a matter of days and weeks, instead of years, labor mobility is extremely fluid, and retraining for a new position is possible.

A degree takes years, and tens of thousands of dollars these people don't have. Not only that, how many have the educational foundation to take on a job that requires strong understanding of maths and science? America's failure with STEM is really biting its ass right now.

> "We are at the first point in history now where we are eliminated unskilled work, but not replacing them with anything other unskilled labor"

We're also at the end of the first era in history where some forms of unskilled labor have put people solidly in the middle class. Unskilled middle-class work is being eliminated; there's some demand for unskilled workers, but not at those income levels.

This is going to lead to some hard transitions, which are going to take time to shake out.

With new jobs requiring increasingly more knowledge and skill there comes a point that it take longer to learn a new job then it takes for this job to become obsoleet?

Also, who is going to pay the bills while you are learning for your next job?

Innovation happens mostly during periods of abundance not during periods of actual scarcity. Innovation requires access to sufficient resources for experimentation and testing.

If scarcity really was the mother of invention then there would be no poor?

>Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man: thus far through our history, we've been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory labor, factory labor to "service" work, etc.) But that era appears to be coming to an end. In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom X% of intelligence, we don't automatically get more innovation -- we just get structurally unemployed people.

Not a straw man at all.

Low Skill Industry will just change its definition. Maybe computer programming becomes a "low-skill", commoditized field. Who knows? It will be probably be something we haven't even thought about yet.

It's funny you ask someone to "prove it". You are also restating a popular theory, but your theory has failed when we look at economic history.

>But that era appears to be coming to an end.

That's news to me. Before the recession, there were more jobs being created than at any point in history.

I admit the author is a little bit out there, but it does seem like a quite real possibility that there will not be enough work for humans if A) the population keeps growing and B) technology gets smarter and can automate more.

I'm not saying it will happen (we're too early on the AI curve), but it might, and then there will have to be some kind of major social upheaval because humans, as all animals are meant to work for their own survival. Socially we don't tolerate welfare very well (neither the envious worker nor the unemployed recipient, frankly).

How will we do that? Will we shift people to purely intellectual pursuits? What happens when are brains are feeble by comparison to the AI that surrounds us? These are all interesting questions to ponder. So while it may be a turnoff to hear some crackpot proclamations about the fate of humanity, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a worse guess than "everything will work out just like it always has."

It already has happened. Modern farmers are as productive as 10,000 peasants. When basic needs are taken care of by machines/robots/automation people move into entertainment/healthcare/service industries. Starbucks, Disney, Hollywood, Facebook, are all businesses that exist because our caloric, shelter, textile needs are easily met.

I look forward to the future. The less effort humans spend making the things we need the more time we can spend creating the things we want.

> Modern farmers are as productive as 10,000 peasants.

I realize you're exaggerating, but it seems like the real number is more like 10x, and cannot be much more than 120x: http://www.ofac.org/issues/faqs.php

> On average, one average farmer feeds over 120 people today compared to 1900 when one farmer fed about 12 people.

I think you forgot the fact that we eat food that takes much more work to grow. if we will return to eating mostly rice and beans(like in india for example) - the work in those fields can be highly automated , and i'm pretty sure a farmer can feed a lot more than 120X people with rice and beans.

And what does the talentless auto-worker who got laid off do in this robot operated future?

I have a feeling the entertainment in the future will look an awful lot like really bad Youtube videos.

The fundamental problem is that people don't like change. I've encountered this a few times. I invent a system process to make a work flow simpler, people resist because they don't want learn.

One key example was an intranet out of office board. The secretaries maintained a list of who was in or out (context: 13 years ago with very little good groupware). Engineers would sign out the scratch themselves off. Was it consistent? No. The system was very simple and engineers loved it. Did the secretaries? Nope. Did it get traction? Nope.

I think the secretaries were inherently aware that one of their roles was being replaced and thus resisted it.

Those who's jobs rely on inefficiency are not incentivized to improve efficiency.

A lot of innovation replaces labor input with energy input. So far, we've been replacing jobs that disappear by consuming more raw materials and energy to make more crap so everyone can have a higher standard of living. If energy/raw materials is the bottleneck instead of labor, all of a sudden the economy is a zero-sum game.

It would still not be a zero sum game since we could still be (a lot!) more effective in how we use the energy and the resources.

Nope: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/05/2009-most-energy-efficie.... The amount of energy needed to produce $1 of output keeps falling.

Not if the universe is infinite i suppose?

Between 1995-2002 the us lost something around 2 million jobs to Chinese manufacturing. But at that same time the chinese lost 15 million jobs to the robots.

Efficiency is taking away jobs because technology is to some extent a zero sum game.

Once technology is able to compete with us in a certain field, that will be used in other fields quickly.

So we need to innovate as you say. But, what happens when technology becomes better at innovating than we are?

Agreed. The solution presented is by far the absolute worst to the wealth-gap issue. It reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron". The only way to achieve pure equality is to handicap those individuals and businesses who are the most effective.

Artificially reducing efficiency is of course stupid. However, I think new forms of wealth distribution might be required, because it certainly isn't a given that there will always magically emerge new jobs to replace the old ones.

Of course as an alternative to new forms of wealth distributions, people without jobs can simply starve to death. After a few years, there will again only be people with jobs. (I don't suggest this is a good solution, just that it is one reason there will magically always be jobs for people).

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