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Comment by cleandreams | Hacker News Reader

It's not just issues of tech and economics but perhaps more importantly, of power. If workers have political representation (power) than these productivity increases can feed into wage increases and hour reductions. A big if. In USA, workers are pretty powerless. That means it is most likely to result in massive waves of unemployment and political instability.

When I first moved to the city in which I live there were NO homeless. That was in 1980. Since then the working class economy here crashed and the professionals took over. Now we step over bodies in the streets.

I think it is likely that the AI wave will be this, but worse.

BTW my last job was at an AI company as a high level tech contributor.

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>When I first moved to the city in which I live there were NO homeless. That was in 1980.

The same people were still unemployed and on the fringe of society. They just used to be rounded up and put in mental institutions.

The labor statistics are pretty clear that the 80s weren’t a better time for employment.

Visible homelessness you are referring to is generally a drug policy issue more than anything.

>Visible homelessness you are referring to is generally a drug policy issue more than anything.

Drug and/or alcohol abuse (not use) is often a symptom of an underlying condition, typically associated with despair. It's escapism.

Despair: the complete loss or absence of hope.

I think a lot of people suffer from despair in the US today. I remember in the 1980s, farmers were killing themselves at quite a high rate because of automation and consolidation (big agg) and them losing their family's farms. I think that same thing has caught up with the rest of the population in the last 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_the_Uni...

Homeless != jobless. Theyre not the same thing.

The statistics are pretty clear that the 80s were a MUCH better time to rent.

Drug usage is mostly caused BY homelessness. There is a strong economic incentive in play explaining why you believe the opposite.

We're told that homelessness is caused by drugs rather than endlessly rising rents because a lot of very rich people are making ungodly sums of money from endlessly rising rents and theyd like to continue. For that they need ownership of media and a good scapegoat - both of which many of them have.

Not too many magazines owned by homeless people rather than property developers but if there were theyd tell the opposite story.

The people that maintain jobs aren’t the visible homeless OP is referring to. The dude in a tent on embarcadero shooting up isn’t working as a barista 40 hours a week.

He probably will be after 5-10 years of homelessness. Drugs salve the pain and despair of being homeless which becomes overwhelming after a few years on the street with no hope in sight.

Theres no way somebody on a low wage is going to be able to afford rent anywhere near Embarcadero. The land-parasites have the market locked up.

There has to be a tipping point when enough jobs are done by machines that there are not enough wage earners to buy products and services created by these machines. At that point a choice must be made, to either take the machines and lock them behind secure walls to only be used by the privileged and leave everyone else to squalor, or to fundamentally change the structure of society where work and money are no longer core elements. I've got my bets on which one will occur.

Which one do you think will occur?

I think the movie Elysium makes a decent prediction for a potential near term future.

It looks like AI is more likely to render knowledge workers less valuable rather than making low skill workers less valuable.

Now if you get AI + Robots (with dense energy) to work together, yeah we’re all in trouble.

No need for dense energy. The robot plumber can plug itself in in your bathroom, or run a cable from the robot plumber car.

Cost of products made solely by machines will approach zero. If machines take all the jobs, humans will live like aristocrats. Imagine telling farmers 200 years ago, that 95% of the humanity won't be farming at some point. Imagine them making bets similar to yours.

That’s not going to happen overnight. Producers will keep the price the same for a higher profit margins because other things in life still require money.

> Cost of products made solely by machines will approach zero. This is going to end capitalism.

Money is just a game coin. The aristocracies need it because they need someone to provide services to them. By creating that bond an economic and currency system has to be created as well. But once they don't need people to provide services, well, they can remove that system too.

That pretty much means the end of everything for ordinary people and the beginning of the "Lord of light". That also means that humans probably won't be able to go through the great filter -- yes I believe it is not a scientific filter, but a social one.

Labor is not the only requirement for production. Resources will become the limiting factor, and their price will rise above what non-AI-owning people will be able to afford. So back to square one of scarcity.

> there are not enough wage earners to buy products and services created by these machines.

i keep hearing this argument, but is this actually true historically when machines took over a lot of jobs (like, farming)?

We never had machines before that could take over all of the jobs. We don't yet, but we are postulating what would happen if we did.

I agree.

I should be forced to pay to keep all the arithmetic workers employed, even though we now have calculators that make them obsolete.

Why should arbitrary people be kept afloat in exchange for doing nothing?

Okay, so, the year is 2036 and your second child has just celebrated her first birthday. The economy is humming, production of all goods and commodities are way up. Unfortunately, you and your spouse are both unemployed at the moment, because for any skill that you have to offer the labor market, a machine is already available that does the job better, faster, and more cheaply. Quicker fingers, stronger arms, faster legs, and now a mind.

Your kid is hungry and your savings account is running low. What do you do?

I think there will come a point, where almost everything will be automated by machines. Since we cannot just get rid of billions of people, we have to find a way to both feed the people and have something for them to do. That is unless AI takes over control of humanity. This is similar to how prisons function. They have to keep large masses of people, feed them, keep them peaceful, without expecting anything in return.

Ohh, so many reasons.

* Busy people are peaceful people. Idle hands are the devil's playthings.

* Those "arbitrary people" are our neighbors, and prone bodies draped across the sidewalks are bad for property values.

* Allowing domestic industries and expertise to vanish too quickly can have unintended consequences. Try buying a new set of subway cars in the US today...

That being said, nobody suggested forcing employers to keep redundant positions open. There are plenty of other ways to help keep people productive and engaged in a shifting industrial landscape, which could be funded through various kinds of taxes on the use of AI.

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