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Comment by methuselah_in | Hacker News Reader

I don't know for aging economics this is somewhat good. But for developing countries it's horrible. Where humans has to search work each day to find food for night

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Is humanity really at a point where we can't think of anything more useful than "carry things about" and "put things in a box" for those people to do? If that's really the state we're in then a bunch of robots doing it instead is the least of our problems.

I think getting adequate housing, food, and Healthcare is useful for workers.

Perhaps if people didn't need to prove that they deserve these necessities this conversation about robots replacing humans wouldn't be so dire.

It doesn't seem like we are close to robotics providing housing, food, and healthcare for nominal costs to everyone. Seems like we still need a lot of humans working in those spaces.

In particular, durable goods (and human bodies and even hair) need a lot of maintenance. So far, at least, robots aren't especially gifted at maintenance tasks.

Isn't it also a problem that we've put people who's capabilities are equal to those kind of tasks into the "useless" category? Not everyone is cut out to be a programmer, which by the way, will also eventually be in the "useless" bucket. In reality, "better things to do" usually means just a lot of people in poverty.

Welfare systems are nationalistic. The US will tax companies using robots and redistribute it to Americans while the people assembling widgets in developing countries will be out of a job. I'm still optimistic that the raw increase in economic productivity will somehow sort everyone out eventually, but it could be bumpy.

That corporate taxation though hasn’t worked too well so far. What makes you think that having robots would change anything?

I would suspect that in these countries labor is cheap enough that replacing it with robots would not be cost effective.

And once it's cost effective for robots to do it, you might as well move the factories close to where the stuff is needed and transport raw material that's more fungible.

If we also sufficiently automated food production, there ought to be enough calories to feed everyone, right? Right?

Industrialized agriculture already produces enough food to feed the world. The remaining problem is a question of distribution.

Food waste is tragic. Now no one eats that $5 iceberg lettuce head, and people are forced to eat unhealthy low nutritional carbs for sustenance.

Why don't they eat the $5 lettuce? Is the argument that it's too expensive here? I thought fast food was more expensive.

Haha good one.

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