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Comment by johngalt | Hacker News Reader

Get ready to have the same old arguments about Marxism. Only instead of 'means of production' it will be 'means of technology'. The article isn't looking for truth its looking to push an agenda about class with technology as a proxy.

Technology invariably leads to an overall increase in jobs and wealth. The computer calculating amortization tables may put a banker out of work, but it also allows thousands of unskilled workers to perform a task that would require calculating one. A job they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

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I'm not surprised that tech crunch would post a polemic article with an assumed left-leaning consequence.

I'm not surprised a HNer with the user name John Galt (hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged) would call the article "agenda pushing."

But I would be bummed if this above stayed the top comment, as it seems to be agenda pushing in its own right.

Maybe these sorts of articles bring out the worst of HN.

I do find it kinda amusing that someone taking the name of a Rand hero would cry "oh noes teh Marxism!" in response to an article with "If left-versus-right is the only lens through which you can view the world, then you really need to start thinking outside the box in which you have jailed yourself" in its closing paragraph.

Ouch, the worst of HN?

HN should pay attention to the narrative given to the tech community. Specially when it is routinely co-opted by people seeking to make some kind of point about economic inequality or gender. I identified this article as something seeking to make a political point rather than looking for any semblance of analysis.

Perhaps I should pick a new username to avoid it undercutting my comments. It's obviously enough by itself to be polarizing. I'm not here to prothelytize.

That invariable seems absurd to me. It seems much more inevitable to me that we eventually will be able to eliminate the majority of jobs. Is that not the goal? A transitory period where unemployment slowly increases is going to happen and needs to be addressed.

Desires are numberless. People will always have wants. Other people will always find a way to satisfy those wants.

When I have been consulting, I've ended up taking stretches of time off to recover from brutal projects. It seems great initially, but I get restless. Eventually I miss doing useful things.

You'll see that writ large in the lives of the rich. Like Bill Gates, a lot of them go from doing paid work to doing charity work.

Warren Buffett said, "I want to give my kids enough so that they could feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing." I think that's because he recognizes that having nothing to do is bad for the soul.

The jobs being done today perhaps.

In practice you see that as automation increases, it just makes the surface area of the market larger. It's hard to see this going forward, but easy to see if you play technology in reverse.

Lets play it in reverse and create jobs by eliminating technology. Lets make vaccuum cleaners illegal. Now more people will be needed to clean carpets in all the office buildings etc... What effects would this have?

1. All the people manufacturing vaccum cleaners would be out of work (minus a small number of jobs)

2. Tons of low skilled labor would now be employed as carpet cleaners (plus a large number of jobs temporarily)

So we declare victory right? Wooo More jobs! Except for...

3. People and business who can't afford to employ large numbers of carpet cleaners just rip out the carpets. Over time it becomes the norm just to not have carpets. Only the wealthy have carpets as a status symbol. (minus carpet installers jobs, and carpet cleaning jobs over the long term)

So at the end of this experiment we end up roughly a wash in total job numbers, and we have to walk on cold floors. It's similar to the parable of the broken window.

I hope we can take advantage of this and make unemployment a measure of efficiency rather than a doomsday indicator.

Agree. The author seems to be blaming technology for the malaise in the economy. If so, we should have been hearing sob stories from the buggy whip makers' guild about how automobiles have destroyed its members' livelihood.

As with most things, I blame overactive, overreaching government that is spending our economy into oblivion.

The problem is that no matter how good people have it, they will always see people who have it a little better and cry foul. There are some people who will never be happy until everyone has been cut down or raised up to the same size.

Thats actually a very important observation about human nature. Bottom quintile population in OECD countries, when observed in context of rest of the contemporary society, appears to be "deprived". But when same set of people are observed in the context of entire societies a few hundred years back (pre-industrial revolution?), they seem to be living a very decent life.

What does 'means of technology' mean?

edit: Full disclosure, I'm totally trolling because I think the parent's definition of 'means of technology' will fall into the definition of means of production.

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