Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

Maybe capital growth is decoupled from job growth, but why is it that Apple and Google and Walmart and Target and Whole Foods and Starbucks and GE and your local busy restaurant and market and machine shop are still hiring like bananas?

Demand causes job growth. No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple Store from needing a genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders. We still need plumbers and nurses and CNC machinists and spot welders and longshoremen.

Why is Kia still hiring in West Point, Georgia? And, where are those robotic unbuttoned-shirt baseball-cap-cocked-to-the-side douchebag bots that greet my nephew at Abercrombie? Oh, right, they're still human.

A lot of industries and companies are still trying to climb out of the 5 year funk we're arguably still in. A lot more companies realized that they could simply work their remaining people into the ground, create an atmosphere of uncertainty and abject fealty, and pocket the difference rather than increase headcount.

My theory? We're in a whole new ballgame full of the following people:

* Those who are willing to get their hands dirty

* Temporary workers and those who like part-time work for the flexible hours and variety of gigs

* Those smart enough to get degrees and certification past their high school diploma or GED, and get those in-demand technical jobs in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and services

* A bunch of people who are either unwilling or unable to accept any of the above and/or are still looking for Dilbertesque nothing jobs in cubicles in office parks overlooking other office parks in positions at whatever companies and having longer titles than responsibilities (e.g., Assistant to the Regional Inside Sales Manager, Northeast US [except NY]).

Abercrombie isn't going to buy a robot greeter to a replace a human employee, they are just going to close more stores and get rid of the greeter, the folder, the cashier, the manager, the janitor, and the driver.

http://investorplace.com/2013/02/abercrombie-fitch-to-close-...

Think about how many human hands would be displaced if when I ordered an Abercrombie shirt online, it was shipped to my house directly from a factory in China. That may not be happening yet, but there is still that potential level of disruption ahead. You'll probably still need your barrista though!

I think this is a major revolution coming. The entire service industry is built off people having to drive to stores, interact with humans, and buy things there. It is much more demand reactive and inventory efficient to ship from the source the things we want, planning them in advance, and delivering them directly.

I mean, I would personally never have a waiter at a restaurant. Put a touchscreen on the table, let me pick what I want, and either I'll go to the kitchen and pick it up (and why can't a robot do the cooking?) and take it back, or even better, have it delivered to the table.

Why am I in a restaurant ordering? Why can't I just order take out and have an automated car delivery service drop it off?

Its much more expensive to have human restaurant staff, and fundamentally doesn't matter if you're willing to admit it or not but dating and "conspicuous consumption" already drives those expenses. Unless you've never gone on a date fancier than a picnic or perhaps McDonalds and then bragged about it to friends...

The startup lesson for today is the first SUCCESSFUL game changing industry altering automated restaurant is going to sell $500 steaks out of a vending machine not $0.50 hamburgers. And its not solely because of simple marketing buzz either. It needs to be the most expensive place in the market. Look at peapod, by far the most expensive possible way to get a bag of cheetos in my cabinet, even though its probably the cheapest to supply (aka the most profitable way). The ipod did not succeed because it was the cheapest player on the shelf at walmart.

Re. Restaurants (rather than fast food places):

They will always exist because the presence and demeanour of staff on the restaurant floor sets the expectation for social interaction in the immediate environment. One function of the waiting staff is to provide a degree of protection from unwanted interactions from other patrons in the restaurant. One of the reasons you go to a restaurant (rather than eating at home) is to experience the pleasantness of being part of a communal group without the risks of eating beside random strangers. The staff provide that mediation (and contribute to the milieu) and are not going to be replaced by robots any time soon.

Why can't a robot do the cooking? Because cooking is an art and we continually demand novelty.

No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple Store from needing a genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders.

Really? You can't imagine a robotic shirt-folding device could ever be invented? Whatever tech news you're paying attention to is about 70 years out of date.

That's not counting that if shirts were on hangers and you could easily get a hanger of "everything that fits me well" then they wouldn't need folding at all.

To help the imagination along:

https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+folding+robot

You two make me laugh.

You just invented a robot that fits on the back of a horse, picking up the poop, putting street-cleaners out of business.

I don't think there's going to be a robotic shirt-folding device. More likely, shirts will be "printed" on demand. No store necessary.

Actually, I will need a robotic shirt-folding device, but in my home. Folding shirts sucks.

So, dissolve the shirt at the end of the day, and "print" a new shirt for every day.

The Apple example is interesting, when you consider their market cap vs the number of people they employ (around half a million in the US according to http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/).

Now, I imagine that most of these jobs (in the US) are going to be store workers. Consider that Apple used to exist without any Apple stores at all. There will come a point when they have a store in every town that matters and they will mostly stop hiring store staff (apart from as replacements).

In fact you could even consider the possibility that they could probably close all of their stores without damaging their market cap that much, but it would be devastating from a job creation point of view.

Think of the other tech giants like Facebook, Google etc. How many jobs do they create vs their revenue?

Exactly - those companies are hiring because they're successful. Why are they successful? Because they have better margins than their competitors. Sure, they're hiring, but they have the most attractive (from their perspective) ratio of employees to revenue.

Well said, with one caveat: that ballgame isn't new; it's the same ballgame that's been played, with the same players, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The sky has been perpetually falling for 300 years, yet here we are, banging away on our keyboards in our climate-controlled abodes with full bellies, worrying about whether we'll get rich or merely live comfortably.

The capacity of people to believe that the end is nigh via any of a seemingly infinite number of imaginative scenarios despite the historical precedent to the contrary is simply stunning.

I understand what you're trying to say, and I agree to some extent, but you're making some very big assumptions.

> The sky has been perpetually falling for 300 years, yet here we are

Maybe the sky takes 300 years to fall. Did you think about it that way?

> The capacity of people to believe that the end is nigh [..] despite the historical precedent to the contrary

What historical precedent? Come on, tell me what happened to the last human civilisation to go through industrialisation and computerisation and, lastly, robotification. I'm dying to know what happened to them and see what lessons we can learn from how they handled the utter demise of manual and low-skill labour in their societies.

Don't be obtuse. I'm referring to the historical precedent set by the last million times some group believed that the world was going to shit, and that their group knew exactly how. Historical precedent clearly tends towards continuation and solutions for the problems that plague us rather than death and destruction because we could not figure them out.

Of course I've thought about it that way, but now let me ask you this: why do you want to think about it that way? What is it inside of you that drives you to believe that THAT way is the correct way to think about it? Doesn't the fact that you are worrying about it mean that the problem is comprehensible to the majority of the human race, that there are probably also millions of other people worrying about it, that the more of a problem that particular problem becomes, the more people will think about it, and that a solution will probably be found? How many times does that situation have to play out before people no longer listen to that demon inside of them which says that the unknown will destroy all of us? Answer: never I hope, because it is that demon which saves us, time and time again.

Stop trying to cast people's legitimate arguments as mere products of some deep-seated fear of the unknown. If you talk like that we can't have any kind of proper discussion. I could just as easily retort that your rose-coloured reassurances are nothing but a manifestation of your inner child's need for a comfortable continuation of the status quo.

And I don't know why you keep pointing to history as a source of solace. History is nothing but an endless procession of empires and civilisations falling in tatters, no matter how many of their plucky young problem-solvers were united in worry. Just because people tend to cry wolf doesn't mean there's no such thing as wolves.

Anyway, no-one is arguing that humanity per se will not survive the emerging tech tsunami. We are, I hope, trying to calmly and rationally discuss its profound implications for the socio-economic structure we know and enjoy today, what we can do to prepare ourselves and others, and what roles we might seek or try to create for ourselves to do the greatest good in the coming era.

The technologies are different, but the argument that bad things will come of technological advance is always the same. Luddites are nothing new, and just as their argument is the product of a deep-seated fear of the unknown, so too is yours.

When civilizations fail, they do not fail because of technological advancement. I challenge you to name an example which did.

These arguments are not being raised by Luddites! These are not the vague grumblings of displaced union laborers, but well-articulated concerns of the people actually bringing about these changes to society. You're fooling yourself if you think "society" will magically fix itself when nobody has to work and thus nobody gets paid. That nebulous "society" is right here, looking for the answers to difficult questions.

Now, remind us what happened to Rome once there was abundant free bread and entertainment? You can't say that technological advancement never causes societies to fail, because we have exactly zero historical precedent.

A Luddite, as it is commonly used, is someone who believes that technological advance will cause harm to some segment of society, and the term is applied independent of whether the fretter believe they will be harmed by that advancement or not.

>You're fooling yourself if you think "society" will magically fix itself when nobody has to work and thus nobody gets paid.

If no one has to work, then there is no shortage of goods to supply everyone's needs. If there is no shortage of goods to supply everyone's needs, then no one HAS to work. Or are you worrying about a small group of people controlling the vast majority of automated production, and thus being able to enslave everyone else?

Seriously? No, really... Are you seriously worrying about this? You DO realize that even if such a scenario were ever to actually occur, it won't be in our lifetimes, or even in our children's lifetimes, right?

Worrying about this is akin to worrying about an asteroid slamming into earth 200 years into the future. It's kind of silly.

>Now, remind us what happened to Rome once there was abundant free bread and entertainment?

Oh, correlation, how often you are confused with causation!

The Roman Empire most certainly did not fall due to overabundance.

This discussion has gone from bad to ridiculous.

A Luddite, as it is commonly used, is someone who believes that technological advance will cause harm to some segment of society and then wants to stop that technological advance.

We're talking about creating technology, within our own lifetimes, that will make most human labor obsolete. This will require a massive restructuring of society. I'm aware of one local company that is laying off over 100 manufacturing jobs and creating a small number of engineering jobs in their place. The way our society is currently structured, if those 100 people can't find some other labor to perform in exchange for money before their unemployment benefits expire, they will go without shelter and starve. It doesn't matter how much food there is, if they don't have the money to buy it.

> This discussion has gone from bad to ridiculous.

Indeed - at this point I can't even tell what your argument is. We are not Luddites, no matter what you erroneously believe the definition to be.

You do realise that you are not the first person to have imagined the post-scarcity society, right? Well, yes, of course it would be nice to live in a socialist utopia of plenty. The trajectory we are on does not appear to lead to such a utopia, however - hence the conversation.

And I believe we will see the beginning of this within our lifetime, absolutely, in fact we are seeing it right now. In 20 years' time it may well be much too late.

Wouldn't it be good to manage the transition gracefully, rather than risk 200 years of near-feudalism, fighting to regain something akin to democracy in the face of an immensely empowered capital-class aristocracy?

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