Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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> AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of job losses. must of us are up for the chop if/when competent AI agents become possible.

> But those profits will not be shared. Human productivity has exploded in the last 120 years, yet we are working longer hours for less pay.

Don't you have to pick one? It seems a bit disjointed to simultaneously complain that we are all losing our jobs and that we are working too many hours. What type of future are we looking for here?

If machines get so productive that we don't need to work, everyone losing their jobs isn't a long-term problem and may not even be a particularly damaging short-term one. It isn't like we have less stuff or more people who need it. There are lots of good equilibriums to find. If AI becomes a jobs wrecking ball I'd like to see the tax system adjusted so employers are incentivised to employ large numbers of people for small numbers of hours instead of small numbers of people for large numbers of hours - but that seems like a relatively minor change and probably not an especially controversial one.

I did not argue that cogently.

At each "node" of the industrial revolution, lots of workers were displaced. (weavers, scriveners, printers, car mechanics). Those workers were highly paid because they were highly skilled.

Productivity made things cheaper to make, because it removed the expensive labour required to make it.

That means less well paid jobs with controlled hours. This leads to poorly paid jobs with high competition and poor hours.

Yes new highly paid jobs were created, but not for the people who were dispossessed by the previous "node".

> If machines get so productive that we don't need to work, everyone losing their jobs isn't a long-term problem

who is going to pay for them? not the people who are making the profits.

> who is going to pay for them? not the people who are making the profits.

They kinda have to. If I'm so productive at producing food that I grow enough for 2,000 people, I have to find 2,000 people to feed. Or the land sits fallow and I get nothing at all. There is a lot of wiggle room at the margins, but overall it is hard to get away with producing more stuff and warehousing it.

We'd expect to see a bunch of silly jobs where people are peeling grapes and cooling the wealthy with fronds; but the capitalists can't hoard the wealth because they can't really do anything with it.

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit.

A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth."

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

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