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Comment by RevEng | Hacker News Reader

I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the paradox they referred to. However, it also tends to come with a major shift in wealth since in the short term the owners of the machines are producing more with less. As it becomes more common place and prices change they lose much of that advantage, but the workers never get that.

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> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again.

That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

sure sure

What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.

As predicted in The Diamond Age.

Automation made the TV inexpensive, but if you look at a chart on inflation almost everything that cannot be easily automated has risen in price.

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cpichart2019-...

Surely U.S. housing was not twice as automatable 12-13 years ago as it is now.

No, that rose in price for different reasons

Economies of scale were realized in the tv, but not the house. Maybe bc they aren’t realizable in housing, maybe bc regulation, maybe bc of the nimby veto, etc.

I think it’s rather because of scarcity: you can’t scale and automate land/prime-location land

Well you can scale it, which is why housing affordability is higher in many places where the cities are actually far denser than Australia. There are perverse incentives not to though, property prices don’t rise (which is what investors want) if you actually focus on increasing supply.

People are building houses with way more features, that last longer, have better thermoregulation, and just more comfortable to live in.

Same goes for TVs too. That’s clearly not the reason why house prices rose so drastically.

Good quality Goodyear welted boots, adjusted for inflation, are cheap AF. I can get an excellent pair from Grant stone with horween leather for ~300 USD when on sale.

A pair of Nike jordans or air maxes is often in the ~120 range and made of far inferior materials.

Boots have never been cheaper/accessible before. The people that bring up repairable shoes don’t wear them or buy from shit brands like Thursday, doc martins, or timberland. You deserve your poor quality footwear.

Brand new boots are cheap because some child in a 3rd world country makes them. Having them repaired in my country costs enough to generally make it worth getting new ones.

It's more like automated, industrial stuff is cheap, while land and human labor is expensive (and thank God for that!)

Some old stuff is now cheap: Grain, oils, clothes, steel, heating, electricity and books, for example.

That is the famous Baumol effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Have you seen the land prices

What land prices? There's plenty of cheap land, it's just a bit far away from where most people live. But guess what, population densities were also lower a century ago.

Sure, just like less desirable products of every category cost less essentially by definition. But that’s not really a retort to someone asking by why land prices have risen so much.

Population increases through immigration or birth and the area (a city) staying the same size. Plus covid people valuing a house more.

> it's just a bit far away from where most people live

And now you need a vehicle which with its yearly costs adds up to the price of the land in the first place, because there are no trains, you can't ride horses on the highway and you don't have neighbors that are selling/trading what you need.

Exactly.

Living quarters, transportation, healthcare, food. What were theses figures in 1926, and how much work is needed to achieve them.

> That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.

Is that trend still true? I can look from the 50s to 2000s and buy into it. I'm not clear it is holding true by all metrics beyond the 2000s, and especially beyond maybe the 2020s. Yes, we have better tech, but is life actually better right now? I think you could make the argument that we were in a healthier and happier society in that sweet spot from 95 - 2005 or so. At least in NA.

We've seen so much technological innovation, but cost of living has outpaced wages, division is rampant, and the technology innovations we have have mostly been turned against us to enshitify our lives and entrap us in SaaS hell. I'd argue medical science has progressed, but also become more inaccessible, and, somehow, people believe in western medicine LESS. Does not help that we've also seen a decline in education.

So do we still prefer improving our standards of living in the current societal framework?

>That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work

That's more because we are never given the chance. We only get to keep working or fall of the rat race and at best be delegated to Big Lebowski style pariah existance.

Yes, and housing is priced by competitive auction so if you drop out of the rat race and other people don't, you'll just get out-bid.

> we could likely accomplish that by working very little

Yeah I know many people who do in the small town I live in. Mostly elderly who are used to it still, but also some young people who want to work just enough to buy what they need and not 1 minute more. I could've retired at <20 if I would've enjoyed that. Now I enjoy it more; it's kind of relaxing that kind of lifestyle; not because of not working but because of needing nothing outside your humble possessions.

Heck no. Given the choice most people would want to do remote work. COVID showed that we can actually achieve remote work, and suddenly many people realized they had a life they loved, without having to lose chunks of it to an unpaid commute that was baked into the cost of work.

Given actual alternatives, workers have made their preferences clear.

Culture also plays a part - America is uniquely mercantile and business first. Workers and citizens in other countries have made different choices.

As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.

Such is the republican lizard brain these days.

Seems pretty easy to work around with "UBI for citizens" only. There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.

There's been enormous pushback, pushes for privatizing (ruining) it, underfunding it from Congress, an absolute refusal to remove the criminally low income cap on contributions, etc.

One could make the argument that the modern Republican Party has in fact largely been shaped by this pushback.

I still like the idea of clawing back mineral and water rights and paying for basic services out of the money payed by industry for the right to dirty our air and water. As a citizen you're entitled to compensation for the smoke you're breathing.

People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs.

> People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs

Of all the Scandinavian countries, only Norway has any oil resources of significance.

The Scandinavian welfare model is primarily tax-funded.

My quick look at Swedish exports shows that the largest export is finished equipment at 14%, fuel exports at 7.1, 4.8% wood and paper, 3.6% iron and steel, of which I'm sure a lot of that equipment is made. 3.4% plastics, which is just oil in another form.

It looks like you're right and their oil exports are all import/export rather than domestic, but that's still a good bit of mineral wealth.

Yes Sweden has non-trivial mineral resources, but nothing like e.g. China, Russia or Australia though.

The Scandinavian social programs are funded by high taxation. It is mostly a result of political prioritization, and not a windfall of natural resources.

I'd love to make companies pay for their products' entire lifecycle, including disposal and cleanup. It's not right that a company can manufacture future-trash, sell it, and then absolve itself of the negative externality when the customer throws the product away and off it goes into a landfill.

If a company's process produces waste, it should bear the entire cost of leaving the environment the way they found it rather than just pumping the waste into it. If a company's products are not reused, it should bear the cost of taking the used product back and restoring the world to the way it was before the product was built.

this reminds me of retropunk and the hundred rabbits

Yep, we should charge every farm for all the poop that people that eat their food make

Fruit farmers are furious.

>There's not much pushback for social security, for instance, even if minorities get it.

The racist moral panic over "welfare queens" seems to be a counter example.

And the same person who posts about that on Facebook will the next day post “keep your government hands off my social security check.”

And why do citizens get it? USA killed a lot of the world for their wealth and kneecapped anyone who didn't play along

A lot of conservatives want to retroactively throw off non whites from citizenship because they think birthrate citizenship is disgusting.

Expect a real movement to reduce the number of citizens in this country. Specifically, if you can’t trace your lineage to a founding father (including for kids of Geman or iish immigrants), than they want you disenfranchised.

Heritage Americans vs “hyphenated Americans”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphenated_American

Minorities don’t just get social security. People don’t get social security if they don’t work or don’t have a spouse who worked. They pay in to the system via payroll taxes. With UBI who is going to pay into that? UBI just seems like a pipe dream.

With UBI, everyone is going to pay into that via taxes. It's not any different from other forms of welfare.

You also need a system that is ok with giving you some of said abundance without you working.

Last year the US voted to hand over the reigns, in all branches of government, to a party whose philosophy is to slash government spending and reduce people’s dependence on the government.

To all the US futurists who are fantasizing about a post-scarcity world where we no longer work, I’d like to understand how that fits in with the current political climate.

The thing a lot of people leave out is that literally billions must die for this to happen. In some fully automated world everyone except for a few tens of thousands of the owner class and their technicians will be unneeded. And then what to do?

How did you arrive at that conclusion? Dividing infinity by 1m or 1b doesn't matter if it's really infinite. Just make more machines to make the machines. The existential crisis happens afterwards, and people will kill themselves off without the need for any class warfare at all. In fact the owner class will die first since there will be no more conception of ownership, since everything is supposedly abundant and at your fingertips.

You really believe today's billionaire class will just give up their power over the populace? A world of abundance means the billionaires are irrelevant because everyone would have access to everything and they would never let that happen.

They will hoard the resources, land, anything that is needed for people to stay alive.

Your argument seems to be boiling down to, there's no point to improve quality of life because billionaires are just going to hoard all the improvements.

Surely the problem with that is the billionaires, not the world of abundance though?

It fits because now you can start up the conquering war machine and have a bunch of soldiers who're willing to kill in another country before starving in theirs

Voting for 'indifference to peoples dependence on the government' does not equal 'reduce people's dependence on the government'.

There is zero actual intentional reduction of dependence, just elimination of government support.

I am also fairly certain that if we do arrive at some abundant utopia where you can wish for anything can have it arrive, society will collapse. It's just bringing up 7 billion (probably more) spoiled brats at that point of time. Work on its own is also a form of "social control". Idle hands are the devil's tools etc.

Throughout history, big advances have come from humans having more "idle time", so we should be aiming for the population to be less busy as they can then hopefully focus on pursuing the arts or sciences.

Big advances have also come from some of the most violent, destructive wars the planet has seen.

I agree with you on principle, but I don't think it's straightforward as your point states.

Well, wars are going to happen anyway. If we abolish all idle time, it's pretty much the same as getting rid of artists, poets, philosophers, writers etc.

> big advances have come from humans having more "idle time"

A few people

Which ones?

Generally the rich.

Imo instead of no-strings-attached UBI we should have something like the WPA. Spend ten hours a week or whatever working in local parks/schools/libraries/etc and get paid a basic living wage in return

If you can wish for anything and have it arrive, spoiled brats won't be a thing, because competition and envy for things will be pointless.

Throughout history, the hedonic treadmill has always triumphed. Competition and envy conjure their own objects.

Even if you want to allege that the proverbial pie will become infinitely large, any one person’s slice is finite. However big my neighbor’s slice might be, I can strive to make mine even bigger.

Humans being humans, they will find something petty and pointless to compete socially for or even kill each other for despite being provided infinite physical abundance.

Collapse in a sense of many existing power structures becoming meaningless, yes, certainly.

But that is a good thing.

You are painting this like it’s a bad thing. The workers decided that they would rather have higher working time to buy more things!

A lot of people would not choose to work for half the time as they do now because they do actually like to buy things.

How can you say that when workers don't have a choice? What accessible job has professional level pay and is part time?

Nursing

I'd happily work for 20 hours @200k a year. It'd give me time to work on my own projects.

Issue is that virtually no company offers that deal unless you already have noteriety or money at the level of retiring anyway.

I've met plenty of people that do this. They are contractors, they take on a contract, work for 6 months, take the next 6 off. I also know some tax accountants that do this.

I'd say being able to work on and off at that schedule isn't something I can find on a job board. Hence my point above of noteriety.

Most companies won't hire people with a high degree of notoriety. They may hire those people if they have some degree of fame.

See, we have enough food to feed the entire world, every year.

It's not our production capabilities that keep people hungry; it's either greed or the problem of distribution.

Automation will definitely amplify production but it'll certainly continue to make rich richer and poor, well, the same. As inequality grows, so too does the authoritarian need to control the differential.

Maybe we only have enough food to feed the entire world, because of greed. Every time we've tried to impose a system that spreads the wealth to the masses, rather than it resulting in equality, it has led to suffering and bloodshed. And ironically, in the Soviet Union and China, the death of millions from starvation.

This pattern suggests the remaining knowledge work becoming increasingly extracted upon by the owners of ai enabled firms, in similar fashion to sugar plantation workers across the global south. I would think the cost of doing so would be a level of social and civic unrest similar to the colonial revolutions (Bolivar for example) of the 19th century.

>such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century.

I'm 0.6 centuries old and have never heard that said for existing tech. Human level AI could presumably do human work by definition but that's not the case before we get that, including now.

The 0.90 century old economicists were discussing the idea.

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...

Keynes was a different thing - that we could cut working hours to 15 a week rather than never have to work again. I think that would be quite possible with a drop of living standards - you could do it today by moving somewhere cheap and doing some remote work. I think it didn't happen due to human nature. We both quite like doing something useful with our time and like increasing living standards.

I inherited some money and don't need to work, but do work on stuff because I like doing it. I imagine that's what things will be like post agi.

Be careful not to conflate AGI with the current generative AI revolution. Even if it may eventually lead to AGI, it is quite a way from that and the social implications of the current and near term AI is what we are talking about. We can only imagine what this will be like post AGI, but we have some idea of what shifts happen when a technology comes along that greatly amplifies human labor.

Post-scarcity utopia was not an uncommon thing in mid-20th-century sci-fi, especially when you also include Soviet Bloc countries.

Do a search for "the 20 hour work week". You will find plenty of articles from the 50s and 60s talking about how technology is going to make it so we don't have to work anymore. Popular Science was particularly keen on this but they certainly weren't the only ones.

All of those technologies of the past can be managed by humans. Once computers can manage themselves AND other technologies and people, I think it'll be a different situation.

If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted.

However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.

Most non-banana republics across the world define the Minimum standard of living as having all of the things you listed, meaning welfare/social safety nets provide for that. As they should. We’re not animals.

I think that is part of the point, though. As our productivity increases, we don’t see an increase in leisure, instead we see an increase in what we consider the minimum standard of living.

Correct. Of course, that wasn't the case in 1750 or 1900. It wouldn't have been possible then.

Hence why prior technological changes that increased productivity didn't result in living lives of extended leisure, despite some predictions to that effect. Instead people kept working to raise the overall standard of living to what could be achieved when using the new tools to their fullest extent. Doing more, not doing the same with less effort. As you say, we're not animals. We can strive for better.

So I can keep track of your wonderful comment, I'd like to add that looking up "banana republic", I realised Australia seems to fit that description perfectly! The latest crop they've come up with seems to be housing, but instead of fruit companies we have real estate cabals. With respect to the workers at the bottom of a banana republic, whats missing is the element of real choice. They say yes you can choose to not work harder but then you die early or suffer from disease, not much of a choice. Modern slavery is built on this idea of false choice.

I appreciate that Finland considers Internet access of a minimum of 1 Mb to be a basic human right. I am not sure if other countries follow, but I wish the USA did.

It's laughably slow given how bloated the modern Web is. In fact even 10Mbps is barely enough to stream 1080p content.

You’re not entirely wrong about bloat on modern websites, but if you griped about being unable to stream 1080p video to someone even just 15 years ago you would sound absurdly privileged

I’m not really sure the point you’re trying to make behind “as long as you don’t mind dying early and painfully from easily preventable diseases technically you can live in utopia”. Would you mind clarifying your position here?

the pre-industrial utopia has been created

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