Hacker News Reader

Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

I dont think most people are arguing that machines will replace everyone anytime soon - it is that they will replace a huge portion of people. If one person can do the job of 10,000 by being the tweaker / approver of an advanced AI that is still 9,999 jobs eliminated. That might be hyperbole (you still probably will need people to support that system)

View on HN

I agree, but it's true that some jobs should not simply exists.

To this day, if I go to our airport in Sofia (Bulgaria), and my baggage is over the limit of 20 or was it 25kg I have to go to another place, pay for it and come back (why? bureaucracy - not only I have to do it, but I'm slowing anyone waiting for me to this - it's like 25-50 meters one place to the other)

Unlike Frakfurt, Munich or Heathrow airport where I can pay that fine right there.

Some jobs simply should not exist.

Meanwhile if you fatten up by 20kgs you fly for the same price. Just eat your clothes!

looooooooooooooooooool (talking as someone who really needs to shed off 20+kgs)

The difference being, some poor sod doesn't have to carry you to the cargo hold of the plane.

I have occasionally seen people wearing far too many clothes to make the luggage smaller/lighter.

The baggage weight limit has nothing to do with the weight of the aircraft. It is about keeping the bags light enough for handling, to protect the backs of baggage handlers (and automated equipment/belts). Unlike thier heavy bag, a heavy passenger is generally capable of walking themselves onto the plane.

If that's so, why is the luggage weight allowance applied cumulatively across multiple bags for one passenger? And why is it different between airlines and between ticket classes?

Because first class baggage is labelled and treated differently so it never gets bumped. The lower/higher numbers are also uses to force the penalty payments, something first class travellers don't want to deal with at check-in.

This seems unrelated to your original point about safety of baggage handling workers. The purpose of a max single bag weight is to facilitate handling. The purpose of a per passenger baggage allowance surely is to manage total plane load, hence high excess charges.

Even first class passengers can't turn up with unlimited luggage but, in my experience relating to families flying between London and the middle East, have household staff who make arrangements and coordinate with carriers.

I'm sure some airlines do this. But most airlines allow 20kg per bag.

Might be talking at cross purposes here: per bag 20kg is so the bag can be safely handled by staff.

When I fly between London and East Asia I shop around between different carriers and, in economy class, I'm normally offered up to two checked bags with a total weight of between 30 and 35kg depending on carrier and promotional offers.

Obviously you've never lived through having the weight balance of the baggage on your aircraft being deemed improper. 30 minutes to move to the other side of the airport, whereupon the weight balance is deemed OK, 30 minutes to return. Yes, Chicago.

Jobs don’t just exist to provide the best possible consumer experience. They are fundamental to individual feelings of self worth and societal stability. Unless you have a replacement for those things, endless automation may ultimately do much more harm than good - your inconvenience in Bulgaria not withstanding

There are reasons for it. Probably less so today now that most people just credit cards, but having one place that handles money solves some issues as opposed to having a bunch of places handling money. While there are some jobs that can go the way of the buggy whip maker, this was probably not a good example.

You don't even that to go as high as 10,000. Imagine someone suddenly doing the job of 10 persons, that's entire teams being decimated. Go to a job board and imagine 9 of out 10 job postings not existing. How much harder it'll be to seek another job.

Decimated means 1/10 killed.

I know people don't use it properly, but it's worth knowing.

Unfortunately, the previously incorrect usage won and it doesn't mean that anymore, according to major dictionaries: "kill, destroy, or remove _a large proportion of_" is given as the first definition in the Oxford dictionary used by Google. ("Unfortunately" is, of course, for people who have the original meaning activated because of how the word looks and/or know the historical context and feel the tension with the contextual meaning.)

To add completion to this, decimation was a Roman Legion punishment that was really high up in terms of severity.

The Centuria was a roman military unit of 100 men (The centuria size/meaning actually varied over time) but when the decimation punishment was applied that would mean that (by draw) every 10th men in the centuria would be killed, here is the catch, the people of their own centuria had to kill their own mates in decimation.

I learned it in the context of signal processing, where it means the inverse of the Roman connotation (keep every tenth vs. destroy every tenth).

Yea machines did that to laborers and computers did that to clerks, yet people still have jobs.

People today have jobs, but what we don't hear about are the people who were made redundant and the suffering they went through. They're just forgotten about, or even ridiculed, like the Luddites are today. For the Luddites who were not shot by the state or factory owners, or were tried and literally executed by the state for machine breaking, the rest of them and their families lived and died in utter destitution having formerly lived comfortable lives as skilled laborers and small business owners themselves.

Post-2008 did that to a lot of workers, as well, causing some of them to leave the workforce entirely. I know more people than I'd like to who are over 60 now, but were made redundant in the wake of the financial crisis and economic restructuring. They never worked in their fields again, some of them were forced to retire and others are working dead end jobs for $10 an hour despite having been middle to upper middle class a decade or so prior.

Sure, maybe their kids or their grandkids might be able to dig themselves out of the hole their parents were forced to drag them down into, but that doesn't do much for people who lost their livelihoods and have died/will die in destitution.

>but were made redundant in the wake of the financial crisis and economic restructuring.

The recession didn't make anyone redundant. The people that were laid off were laid off because the people hiring them ran out of money to pay all of their employees. Yes, it is true "many people are laid off because they are redundant", but in the wake of the recession, companies ran out of money and they had to stop doing things that cost money, and then lay off people that did those things.

Also, to be clear, automating work didn't cause those people to lose their jobs - because their jobs were stopped.

Also, I'm very sorry for all of the people that were impacted by that recession. It was big amd a lot of people hurt because of it.

> it is that they will replace a huge portion of people

And not just any people. Lower to middle class, blue collar people.

The type who are the least able to travel for work, most likely to have families, least able to transition between careers etc. And crucially in many countries the people who often decide elections.

and new jobs and industries will be created.

Yes, in the future, while this job goes away now. The problem is likely the interval between "now" and "then", when suddenly this mine closed and you have thousands of miners out of work and unprepared to do anything else. The kids will probably learn to do a new job in a new industry, while their pops will stay at home drinking or go out to kick some butt (or both) - neither outcome very pleasant for the society.

Yes, that’s where things like basic pay become important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com