Hacker News Reader

Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

Some industrial shipping docks can be managed by a very small crew. I think this is the metaphor for what's going to happen to a lot of industries.

View on HN

I’m not so sure. They operate that way because of scale and economy (and tech that enables that). In a future where all industries are optimized in such way, very little will actually flow as most won’t have the money to buy goods, thus factories won’t make goods, thus shippers won’t ship, and the global economy grinds to a halt.

We need waste as much as we need investment. The trick is to find the value in between. I think the sweet spot will be augmenting work, not necessarily optimizing it.

That doesn't seem to make sense. As things get cheaper and wages go down too because there's an oversupply of labor, those poorer people can still afford those cheaper things.

Things never get cheaper. The only things that have reduced in cost is tech related because we kept making advancements as per Moore’s law.

The two things that matter, housing and food, are way way up.

We're talking about factories using low/no labor to produce goods, right? Those goods will be cheaper because they cost less (man-hours) to make. That's obviously already true for all the mass-produced stuff we have that's cheaper (measured by hours of work needed to pay for it) than 500 year old artisinal furniture, cookware, clothes, etc. which was very labour intensive.

Housing is weird because it just sucks up whatever leftover money people have. We all have to eventually spend all our income on something so it's impossible for everything to get cheaper in the long term. That doesn't mean we won't be able to afford stuff, just that we'll spend all our money just like we always have done.

Food would be encheapened by labour-free production just like products.

Luxuries are cheap and necessities are expensive

dark factory

Reply on news.ycombinator.com