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Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

>Why is low fertility rate seen as a bad thing?

Because you'll live way past your productive years and the things you will consume (services, goods, medical, etc.) still need to be produced/done by someone.

The automation aspect in economy has been way overestimated - truck drivers were supposed to be automated 5 years ago, meanwhile we are facing real world issues because of truck driver shortages.

Even jobs that were considered trivial to automate like cashers are still performed by humans - after decades of self checkout tech.

Unless your retirement plan is a shotgun barrell - you need the next generation to both live their lives comfortably and provide for you.

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> meanwhile we are facing real world issues because of truck driver shortages.

Not really. It feels like every few months we get another piece decrying the lack of truck drivers, only for it to gloss over issues of pay. There is no shortage of truck drivers; there's a shortage of places that don't try to exploit them.

> The automation aspect in economy has been way overestimated - truck drivers were supposed to be automated 5 years ago, meanwhile we are facing real world issues because of truck driver shortages.

I wonder how much of that shortage is due to over-hyped predictions about future automation? The predictions don't pan out but succeed at discouraging people from joining the profession.

> Even jobs that were considered trivial to automate like cashers are still performed by humans - after decades of self checkout tech.

Self-checkout is not actually automation. It's just outsourcing the job of cashier to a customer who then works for free.

Ok, but you realize this requires indefinite exponential growth, right?

> Ok, but you realize this requires indefinite exponential growth, right?

No, it probably just means population declines need be very slow and graceful (e.g. very close to steady-state) in order to not create big labor shortages simultaneous with large retiree populations.

Why ? You're not living forever - and nobody is arguing for high fertility rates. Having 2-3 kids per generation sounds perfectly sustainable. 0 or 1 does not.

So, imagine x couples, each of whom has 3 kids in their lifetimes. In 80 years, there are now 3x/2 couples. In 160, there are 9x/4. There are now 11 billion people. Every 150 or so years, having 3 kids roughly doubles the population. (A better model would be a birth/death process with a #kids distribution with a mean 3 and death age with a mean 80, but not necessary to make my point, I think.)

This is exponantial growth.

Not everyone survives or has children - which is why I said 2-3 - it has to be above 2 for replacement, it's not a new concept - lookup replacement fertility rate

Above replacement is exponential growth.

But 2 is below replacement rate

Consume less junk, needs less production.

> Even jobs that were considered trivial to automate like cashers are still performed by humans - after decades of self checkout tech.

That's no longer true in my part of the world. In the supermarkets I frequent, I'm pretty sure that well over 2/3 of revenue is self-scanned.

Change often takes multiple decades. That doesn't mean it's not happening.

As another poster pointed out, self-scan checkout isn't automation, it just changes who does the work from paid employees to unpaid customers. The amount of human labor required remains similar to traditional cashier-staffed checkout.

The rate of checkout is increased. You can take out 20 cashier lanes that need 20 cashiers, replace them with 40 self checkout terminals staffed by 5 or 6 store employees, and people will probably be getting out quicker because the bandwidth is greater.

Or at least all the people buying 20 items or less will, or whatever the figures may be. In previous example, take the 20 checkout lanes, leave 10 staffed by a few employees, and install 20 self check out terminals staffed by a few employees. Direct everyone with full carts to the employees, and people with few items to the self checkout.

Yes, of course it lets stores increase the rate of checkout, because their workforce is every customer so they're only limited by the number of machines they have, instead of being employee-limited. That's still not automation. The same labor is being done, the store's just not paying for it now.

Yes, scanning still needs to be done manually, but the use of hand scanners does make the shopping process more efficient. Customers can bag the products directly while shopping, instead of having to take them all out of the cart to have them scanned and bagged at the cashier.

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