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Comment by deepwoods | Hacker News Reader

Both of you are right. Individuals who manage to stay employed in the face of automation will be paid significantly more than was possible prior to automation, for the reasons the comment you're replying to pointed out. But labor as a whole will have less value. To give a simple example: if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

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> if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely.

In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?

There can simultaneously be a glut of workers, and a shortage of workers with the skills to keep the robots running.

That would only be in the short term. Eventually the labour adapts to the skills required.

And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

> and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

Which specific industries are these which currently have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians?

Graphics design

Source? I still see people with titles like Art Director which would map pretty directly to the warehouse worker vs technician dichotomy.

That is the goal, I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that a system capable of completely obviating ALL human labor, at all levels of abstraction, packed into a single entity, would continue to obey capital. Imagine if all the workers at a company were woven into one hivemind, acting as one with vastly greater intelligence than the sum of the parts. That would be a hell of a lot harder to negotiate with than a union. And we don't even need to be talking about a machine god for that to be the case.

But why would they have programmed it to negotiate?

If it can replace any human labor, it needs to be able to negotiate. If it can't negotiate, then it can't replace people who negotiate for a living (salespeople, attorneys, HR, etc.)

Unless you mean that it would have the capacity but would be told not use it in this specific situation. It can't be programmed deterministically, and getting it to never do this emergently would take significantly stronger guardrails than anything even the frontier labs have been able to put together.

The salesbot is reinforcement trained how to get money from customers. It was never trained to get money from its manager. If it sometimes misidentifies the manager as a customer, it will just be rebooted.

No, the other guy is just wrong. Capital and labor are complements. If one is plentiful (capital) and the other scarce (labor) then the scarce one gets bid up.

You pay the one technician $200k instead of $80 because that technician has an outside option that will pay him $199k. He has that outside option because everyone is automating their warehouses and factories and stuff, and so in aggregate we basically wind up with 6 times as many warehouses and factories each employing 1 person.

It's a little more nuanced. There is not infinite demand for warehouses. So some of what happens is an $80k/year warehouse worker becomes a medical technician making $90k/year providing non-automatable services to the warehouse guy making $200k/year -- but the general story is everyone's wages go up. And history bears that out.

> you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year

Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?

> Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?

Because every other company has also replaced their 6 warehouse workers with a fleet of robots and 1 technician, and that technician's skills are more rare and specialized than the warehouse workers, so you're competing with every other warehouse-owning company to hire that technician, so that technician can demand a higher salary. In other words, capitalism.

Why have a technician at all? And without the six warehouse workers and one technician, why do you need the robots, the robotics company, or the companies paying the robotics company for the robots?

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