Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

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You are right that I was speaking in generalities, in part because a forum isn't the best format for these types of in-depth policy discussions and also because I don't claim to be a policy-wonk. In fact, that's why I prefer engineering roles. But I'll try to clarify a bit.

Let's dilate on "This may lead to a crisis in society" to try to get to a policy. If we can agree on two things we might be able to get a rough scaffolding of a framework to discuss policy. 1) government programs, like everything from social security to roads/bridges take money to run and 2) the vast majority of federal funds come from taxes related to work, like income taxes and social security taxes. By extension, if automation effects jobs, it then affects the programs that create a stable society.

So one aspect is: as automation takes people's jobs, it potentially threatens the ability of government to fund its programs. If a society ignores this, it faces a potential "crisis" if those programs help create the conditions for a stable society. There's a few ways one could address this. On the cost side of the equation, we could use austerity measures to reduce the cost burden. There's certainly something to be gained here, and it would be a long digression to decide which policies are a priority. (For example, I've heard research saying that roads provide the most benefit on a cost basis, followed by early education programs like Head Start). On the supply side of the equation, it seems like there are two options: a) help workers get replacement jobs that pay at, or near, what they had before their job was automated away or b) get the money through a different, non-income based policy. It didn't seem like we did a good job crafting policy in the rust belt related to a). There wasn't much re-investment into those communities or workers, compared to what was gained by automation. There are various ways to address b), including restructuring corporate taxes or instituting an automation tax to make up for the displaced incomes formerly garnered by workers paying a tax. But we went the other way on those, too.

While I concede those are very high-level, the intent is to show there are real discussion points that can be crafted into policy and it's not just some hand-wavy rhetoric.

I believe you may have overlooked one of my key points: we did not have any useful way to predict those consequences at the time production was being automated that would have marked them out as particularly likely.

Automation started in the 1780s, with the industrial revolution. The initial impacts had a lot to do with creating vast numbers of jobs, driving down the cost of all kinds of consumer goods, and heavily driving urbanization. I can't see any easy way to get from there to the rust belt if I'm someone looking forward in 1780. Right now we can treat this as obvious only because we have the benefit of hindsight. I cannot imagine any way in which the modern history of Detroit would have been reasonably and usefully predictable from 1780 (at the time it was a frontier fort under British military control).

You're right, impacts can be decades off. They can even be centuries off. There were a lot of equally credible people who thought automation was going to have utopian consequences that didn't include people losing their productive economic positions. This isn't a binary, either. There were plenty of other possible outcomes as well. How were people in 1780 to know what we do know? What happens if every predicted outcome is taken seriously? What happens if they're then all wrong, or not right on a sufficient timescale? I know how I would expect that to interact with limited government resources.

At the end of it, I think we're likely limited to dealing with consequences and trivially short-term prediction. Those, at least, we have a reasonable shot of observing.

I disagree and I think if you follow the points I laid out, it’s pretty clear that the outcome is fairly obvious from someone who looks from above the system perspective.

When your system is predicated on taxes borne from income, and you implement a disturbance that displaces that income, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see there will a problem looming on the horizon. It’s really just connecting two very obvious points that doesn’t need hindsight centuries later to see. People have been ringing the alarm for decades now, policy makers just found it easy and expedient to ignore them.

I think many politicians knew this but policy development has a different wrinkle. Politicians are incentivized to take a short term perspective because election cycles don’t operate on the same time scale as large scale societal issues. It’s the same reason they are incentivized to raid the general coffers for projects that will be completed during their tenure and leave long time horizon problems for someone else to fix. (If you disagree, look at Illinois and their public pension issues)

(And not to be pedantic, but automation dates back a couple thousand years, at least to the use of water wheels to automate grain flour production. The industrial revolution dates to the late 18th century. While they are related, they aren’t the same thing)

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