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netcan

Our ability to predict technological "replacement" is pretty shoddy.

Take banking for example.

ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking."

Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer.

Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades.

It's actually shocking how little network enabled PCs impacted administrative employment. Universities, for example, employ far more administrative staff than they did before PC automated many of their tasks.

At one point (during and after dotcom), PayPal and suchlike were threatening to "turn billion dollar businesses into million dollar businesses." Reality went in the opposite direction.

We need to stop analogizing everything in the economy to manufacturing. Manufacturing is unique in its long term tendency to efficiency.other industries don't work that way.

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Is there data about this or is just your perception? Because my perception would be different, for example in my country countless bank branches closed and a lot of banking jobs do not exist anymore thanks to widespread home-banking usage (which I also know differs from country to country). This is also from the tales of people that had careers in banking and now tell how less banking jobs there are compared to when they joined in the 80s.

I wouldn't be sure that growth as an industry/business is correlated to a growth in jobs too.

Maybe I'm wrong, I would love to see some data about it.

Googling around, it looks like in the US the number of tellers has declined by 28% over the last 10 years, and is forecast to decline another 15% over the next 10. Earlier data was not easy enough to find in the time I'm willing to spend.

Bank branches for physical contact decreased everywhere, Covid was the last nail in the coffin for many. In the meantime, backoffice jobs rose or even exploded. More and more complex IT, way more regulations from everywhere.

Not sure how overall numbers look like, I would expect slight decrease overall, but for IT definitely grew. Those are really not same type of jobs, although in minds of public are all 'bankers', since all are bank employees.

> Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades.

Profits may have grown but In Ireland at least, the number of branches have declined drastically.

Yes banks employ less people. In my country there are now account managers handling hundreds of clients virtually. Most of the local managers got fired.

I find it easy to say from our privileged position that "tech might replace workers but it'll be fine".

Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff.

Tech innovation destroys lives in our current capitalist society because only the owners get the benefits. That's always been true.

> Tech innovation destroys lives in our current capitalist society because only the owners get the benefits.

If you want to become a (partial) owner, buy stocks. :-)

Do I really own Intel/Tesla/Microsoft by buying their stock? No I don't.

I can't influence anything on any of these companies unless I was already a billionaire with a real seat at the table.

Even on startups where, in theory, employees have some skin in the game, it's not really how it works is it? You still can't influence almost anything and you're susceptible to all the bad decisions the founders will make to appease investors.

Call me crazy but to say I own something, I have to at least be able to control some of it. Otherwise it's wishful thinking.

You can pretty easily submit shareholder proposals for trolling purposes or ask questions.

Other investors will probably vote "no" to your proposals, but for many companies you can force a vote for a pretty low minimum. In Canada, you're legally entitled to submit a proposal if you've owned C$2000 shares for 6 months.

https://www.osler.com/en/insights/updates/when-can-a-company...

The market, in its majestic equality, allows the rich as well as the poor to buy stocks, trade bitcoin, and to own property.

> Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff.

Salaries of the remaining people tend to go up when that happens. And costs tend to go down for the general public.

Owners are actually supposed to only see a temporary benefit during the change, and then go back to what they had before. If that's not how things are happening around you¹, consult with your local market-competition regulator why they are failing to do their job.

1 - Yeah, I know it's not how things are happening around you. That doesn't change the point.

I'm sorry but I have to call BS.

>Salaries of the remaining people tend to go up when that happens.

You're telling me with a straight face that after a company replaces part of its workforce with tech/automation, salaries go up? Really? Please show me some data on that because every single graph I've ever seen of salaries must be wrong then. We've had an enormous amount of innovation and breakthroughs in the last decades, but weirdly enough all salaries remain stagnated. If this is true, they should be going up constantly every time we offshore some work or get more efficient technology.

The company can have 50000% growth and salaries will NOT go up. They basically never go up unless the companies want to retain an employee that's at risk of leaving and the replacement cost is high.

The objective of a company is to give money to its owners, nothing else. Salaries are viewed as a cost, so they will never willingly increase their costs unless it's absolutely necessary.

> And costs tend to go down for the general public.

Assuming there aren't monopolies involved and it's a commodity, yes, that sometimes happens. If there's any monopoly involved, unfortunately companies will simply pocket the difference.

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