Comment by petermcneeley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petermcneeley | Hacker News Reader

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"too few people for all the jobs, for the most part" - Are wages going up?

"But almost everywhere else needs people. Badly. Across retail, restaurants, manufacturing, trades, and on and on, companies are struggling to hire. " - Wow sounds like an exciting star trek future that I cant wait to be part of!

"labor became more expensive than capital" - So wages must be going up right?

"In essence, the authors show that for automation to have widespread benefits it must deliver high productivity gains to more than compensate for the high displacement of workers." - the reason why this sentence makes no sense is because it is written in two frames at the same time. One of a planned economy and the other of capitalism.

"We are in a middle zone, however, with AI able to displace huge numbers of workers quickly, but not provide compensatory and broader productivity benefits." - But what about the horses?

I tried my best to find the central thesis of this rambling multi-tone work. I think it is difficult because it was written with too many different frames.

Capital's willingness to ride out labor shortages without increasing wages seems to have become substantially greater in the last couple of decades.

TIRED: labor shortage -> wages rise!

WIRED: labor shortage -> y'all work harder for maybe a bit of overtime or maybe not, and we'll just absorb the complaints about customer service and product quality. Those damn employees aren't getting a penny more!

Wages are rising: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/12/real-wage-gains-inflation

Just catching up to years of undershooting inflation. In real terms still worse than 1969.

Definitely not. You wouldn't like the food, cars and home appliances of 1969, and you really wouldn't like the healthcare.

The food of 1969? I've had it. It was my aunt's cooking and my uncle's butchering - shooting a hog right in the head and then gutting it, draining the blood, and prepping it to go onto a gigantic smoker, and it was delicious. And if you really didn't feel like cooking food yourself, McDonald's did exist back then, along with things like Kentucky Fried Chicken, Krystal, Burger King, etc.

They didn't throw sugar into every single product on the market, either.

The home appliances? You mean blenders and toasters and refrigerators and mixers that would last 20-30 years before needing to be replaced because they were so well-engineered? Those 1969 home appliances? Like the KitchenAid K45 mixer that was released in 1962 and stayed in production for decades? Like the one my Mom got in 1971 that she still has today, whose motor still works fine, and the only thing that's ever been done is 30 minutes of taking it apart and checking the worm drive gears and re-greasing them? Those 1969 appliances??

And the cars? Yeah those were kinda shitty compared to what we have now.

For the most part though, you're not just off-base on the food and appliances, you're hilariously off-base.

What % of houses do you remember having heating and indoor plumbing?

https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS0...

The aspics were pretty good though.

https://twitter.com/70s_party

Couldn't have had eg good Brussels sprouts though, we hadn't invented them yet.

Why do you think there is a zero sum choice between real terms purchasing power increases and the technology we have today? (Also worth noting I'd happily take a lot of goods from a time where they were built to last)

Built to last, but also generally MUCH less efficient in terms of energy & material usage. Difficult tradeoff.

There isn't a choice, the original post is incorrect.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

That's a graph of disposable personal income, not purchasing power, and it doesn't account of the increased cost of several major spending categories.

It's also the total disposable personal income for the entire country, and not median household income. See the "Units" field: it's in billions of chained 2012 dollars.

It's from 2018, but this shows what's going on more clearly:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

> and it doesn't account of the increased cost of several major spending categories.

Inflation adjustment does cover some of that.

> It's from 2018, but this shows what's going on more clearly:

That's cost of employer healthcare benefits, isn't it? Which causes wages to be an increasingly smaller % of total compensation.

Apples and oranges.

You would like a home from 1969.

You would like the salary saved from 1969.

> You would like a home from 1969.

As I live in California, I've seen 'em. They're not all Eichlers.

> You would like the salary saved from 1969.

A tech worker makes more than 5 times the median 2023 personal income and their industry didn't exist then, so I mean, I wouldn't even if I could afford the house in Palo Alto.

And you wouldn't want to say this to a racial minority or even someone in Appalachia.

You’ve kinda proven the point. The argument made was cherry picking.

Here again - You’ve used the most highly paid subset of workers. In any other nation, and in other industries in America - Tech workers dont get paid that much.

I used the subset that has me in it.

>You would like a home from 1969

The average floor area per person (in the US) has roughly doubled since 1969. Not the most reliable source, but from skimming census data it seems to correlate: https://supplychenmanagement.com/2018/07/15/average-house-si.... I'm personally not much a fan of large houses, but most people are.

> we'll just absorb the complaints about customer service and product quality

AKA our economy consists entirely of monopolies.

I'm a bit disappointed this part of the conversation is buried under everyone arguing about whether the article is right about AI or not, since the real interesting part of the article is why the author(s) seem to think that the reason McDonalds is doing signing bonuses is because people are just just not working, and the article never seems to really understand why people aren't flocking to jobs colloquially known to be absolutely awful and shit jobs.

Similarly, I'm very disappointed that the discussions in the article focus so much on _replacement_ of these workers, but in terms of human replacement, it really seems like AI is better suited to displace management and executives, not the people who perform specialized and physical work.

AI should help people and extend their abilities, and right now it's very good at that. It can be used to make our lives easier _now_, not replace us, and I think this is the real reason the article is so heavily discussed. I think the article explains how the author released a lot of the conclusions they did, and I agree, the author is jumping around way too fast and in my interpretation, making some very wild assertion in the article without further fleshing out their points.

> it really seems like AI is better suited to displace management and executives, not the people who perform specialized and physical work

Management and executives are the ones holding the purse strings for these expensive solutions. Why would they implement something that could replace them?

I commonly have this kind of disappointment on HN.

Employers are always talking out of both sides of their mouths. They signal they want more workers yet are more choosy than ever in terms of pre-employment screening. it's like someone who wants to work at McDonald's has to go through a huge gauntlet of background checks , interviews, and tests, yet companies insist thee is a shortage. maybe try lowering the requirements a bit. And then once you get the job it's more requirements and rules. A lot of low-skilled ppl would rather just not work than deal with t all that crap for a minimum wage job. Part of the problem is maybe the quality of the pool of workers has declined , so more screening needed.

I don't get it. McDonalds can fully automate their restaurants and chooses not to.

There is a crisis in housing and house prices, but we are not automating house production.

The electric car revolution is hitting growth barriers, waiting for cities to electrify enough to support a full car fleet.

None of the problems are primarily technological, they are a failure of resource discovery and electrical infrastructure.

But resource exploitation has got a bad rap and men are not populating materials science, geology, agriculture, ect at university.

We don't need manufacturing, restaurants and trades that can be automated (or made efficient) with technology.

We need more resources and more material wealth, for labour, to labour towards.

I was particularly puzzled by the 2x2. High productivity is a no brainer, but why should we necessarily seek high displacement as its own goal? Low displacement would increase employment and GDP, is that not flourishing?

And what's with using the research scientists who authored Transformers as examples of surplus middle management? Google generated 1.4M per employee in 2022, second only to Apple. Armchair engineers will say they could do as well with a handful of employees, but if this is "low productivity" then sign me up.

Wages are going up and they are going up faster at the low end.

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