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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

The problem is whether the then-candlemakers, or today's knowledge workers, will be out of a job, or not.

In his other recent newsletter post, Marc Andreessen actually claims that AI will not cause unemployment [0].

[0]: https://pmarca.substack.com/p/why-ai-wont-cause-unemployment

A ton of jobs have become obsolete. The candlemaker did lose his job to technology. It’s not obvious that other sectors will be there to offer them a new one, so the fear is justified.

I agree, and it’s not even easy to switch careers. Retraining for some other work means learning a lot of new knowledge and skills, with a body and brain that are not nearly as good as they were at 20. The worker also takes a huge loss in income and status by starting again from the bottom. All this assumes that they even succeed at the change.

I believe that candles weren't cheap. I honestly wonder if we have fewer candlemakers as a percent of the population now as we did, if not in 1845, then in 1345?

More generally, the problem is how the profits from the saved labour are shared around society. That distribution need not necessarily be distributed in return for labour.

> the problem is how the profits from the saved labour are shared around society

Not really. You can take an Econ 101 class to see that high profits will lead to more competition which leads to lowering of prices... which kills the excess profits and results in higher consumer surplus.

There are scenarios of market failures, where you might have a monopolistic entity but we have safety checks for that too with anti-trust policy.

Ok, perhaps I was not precise in my terminology. The problem is how that consumer surplus will be distributed. And whether those who lose their jobs are able to find an alternative source of income. If consumer goods are cheaper, but people are still unable to afford them because they no longer have an income (or a greatly reduced one) then we still have a problem.

> we have safety checks for that too with anti-trust policy.

Yeah I remember when Microsoft came perilously close to dominating the desktop OS market and using that dominance to push their other products, like their suite of Office software. Fortunately the safety checks of anti-trust policy kicked in and they were forced to break up the company to prevent such abuses from happening in the future.

The same thing routinely happens when ISP, TV, and media companies merge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating#Existing_programs

https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consoli...

Obviously it’s in his interests to write that. There’s likely some trivial sense where it’s true but there are always jobs being destroyed in some parts and created in others.

Ignoring that sense, I think it’s a reasonable opinion to hold today, even if it turns out to be wrong.

Fun fact: there are more bank tellers in America now than when ATMs were invented.

> Fun fact: there are more bank tellers in America now than when ATMs were invented.

Proportionate to the population?

Yes. At least, that’s ostensibly how things were right-up until the mid-2000s when online banking (and then covid) upended retail banking - but the general gist of the story is:

The introduction of ATMs meant that a branch could be operated by far fewer people than before, which reduces their operating costs - but more importantly: the investment or business risk involved in opening a new branch in the first place.

Where previously a branch could only be opened in a city with a population big enough to supply, say, 10 branch employees, after the introduction of ATMs it becomes possible to open far more branches in more cities and locations as only, say, 3 people, would be needed to run it.

So previously there would be a smaller number of larger branches, now there’s a larger number of smaller branches, but more people employee overall.

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