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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Even if you have robots you will still need a massive workforce to produce them, to get the resources to produce them, to check them, to maintain them, to repair them, to program them, to update them and so on. Or maybe you believe in a state of singularity in which all of this will happen at the same time? :)

Automation has already been happening in many industries, in case you have not noticed, and that did not result in lost job opportunities on the whole of the economy. Agriculture is also largely mechanized all around the world and you have only a very little portion of the population (5% or so) in developed countries to produce far enough for everyone.

Most jobs in developed countries are service related. These jobs will not disappear even if you automate the production part of the economy.

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Most jobs in developed countries are service related. These jobs will not disappear even if you automate the production part of the economy.

Why not? They already are. Self-checkout, online forms and purchases, ATMs, touch tone phone menus, etc.

Here is Marshall Brain's optimistic but well explained and convincing view: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Exactly, nowadays the majority of people in the developed world are "working" in marketing, finance and other useless areas. It would be far better if they just stay home.

So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement is? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'm not suggesting we should go back to an agrarian society, but we have a serious economic and political problem where the benefits of technological advancement are going in overwhelming proportion to a very small subset of the population. If something isn't done about that, and soon, the resulting upheaval may force us back to pre-industrial living anyway (or more likely, much worse).

> Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up.

Can you support this? Millions of people all over the world are being lifted out of poverty.

Here is a chart of per capita GNI for the past 20 years http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

edi: linked wrong chart

GNI is just a grand total divided by population; people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S.

> GNI is just a grand total divided by population;

Right, per capita, as I stated, but really just GNI is fine too.

> people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S

Unfortunately the google public data didn't have enough US data but take a look at these two charts for India.

First is just India's per capita GNI the second is India's income distribution over the same time frame. Notice how the income distribution is relatively flat and how the GNI is growing.

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

I think this is an excellent point.

>>>Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.

What is the proper proportion?

Why not 1:1?

Would you care to share your measuring system for how do decide if it is 1:1 or not? It seems complex to measure health, "wealth", happiness, and security. I sure haven't found any actionable or reasonably complete metrics in my readings, maybe I am bad at searching.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life

Actually, the wealth has accrued quite nicely to the top 1%, even more so to the top 0.01%. Whereas the rest of the population has seen real pay flatline as you say. That is the real problem.

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