Comment by unono | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unono | Hacker News Reader

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Hackers can solve this problem

- cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in businesses into small bite size chunks that can be done by masses of unskilled workers. This is purely a software task that hackers relish.

- training workers cheaply and effectively, khan academy/udacity/coursera style.The business model for this should not be charging students (an evil practice carried out by colleges) but instead charging businesses for access to those workers.

- decentralizing production. Making what is produced by large factories produceable in the home. 3d printers, home robots, and so on. These are also mostly software problems of controlling mechanical parts.

That there is joblessness is mostly because hackers are not thinking creatively and working hard enough. Help will not come from other segments of society, they are incapable of doing so because they lack the key skill of which we hackers are famous for - inventiveness.

Services like Mechanical Turk/TaskRabbit/eLance etc emphasize workers as commodities leading to a race to the bottom in prices and the most profit for the platform vendor.

Looking at the average earnings on these sorts of platforms it would seem like a challenge to eek out even a meagre existence in a first world country.

The reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to middle class level.

This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion- dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year from a billion users. Imagine a mechanical turk that grew to a billion users - it could be taking $500 a month from users while paying them $5000 a month. Truly immense potential.

Not sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour. This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that will get the work done.

Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a cut when they are capable of finding customers on their own. This leads to a sort of lemon market where the buyers who are willing to pay the highest rates for the best workers will tend to avoid these places altogether.

You're totally correct when it comes to skilled work, they get snatched up when they've proven their worth. However, this cloud labor is for unskilled work.

So yes, they are commodities, but if they are a lot of them, and a lot of work to go around, wages rise. We saw this with the industrial revolution, especially assembly lines. Mid 20th century you could live pretty well as an unskilled assembly line worker, but then the work dried up.

Most modern work, knowledge work, hasn't been turned into assembly line yet. Many would argue that's because it can't be, but I disagree with that, much of enterprise software is about turning it into that (workflows,processes). It just requires more of the same. There are actually very few cloud labor startups (mturk, crowdflower, mobilworks) with at most a 100 programmers, one reason being that it doesn't have the network effects moat that VC's look for. Robotics is another casualty of that. How do you defend your cloud labor,robotics company from competition? That's why it will have to be built from the ground up by bootstrappers.

These platforms make it easier to find labour and thus drives more competition between labour providers but they don't necessarily increase the demand for it, at least at higher pay rates.

It also makes the competition for knowledge work go international which might increase pay in developing countries but lower it in first world countries.

Oh sure, it will equalize wages across the world, with some rich worlders losing in the short term, but I think that's a good thing, why should poor worlder's suffer.

Higher pay rates exist for two reasons, unfair monopoly positions (e.g. bill gates and the OS monopoly of the 90s, actors/athletes), and because there is complex work that hasn't been deskilled yet. Not much can be done about the former except regulations, the latter is where programmers can change the situation. Demand is everywhere - whether it's fulfilled by cloud labor, or by specialized labor - is the question.

Either way, I think we can agree that immense opportunities exist for startups to profit from this space.

There's certainly profit to be made in being a middle man in the labour market but that doesn't really solve the fundamental problem.

If you equalize wages you also need to equalize the cost of living which is something that doesn't seem to be happening because a lot of people have a lot of money locked up in land etc that they are not going to want to see devalued.

If deskilled work does not cover rent payments then it is not much good to anyone.

I have to disagree about being the middle man. Deskilling the workforce into an assembly line is a value creating activity, it's what engineers basically do. The typical middle man is simply there to skim some money because there are communication bottlenecks.

Yes, you're totally right - land will get devalued. The older generations in richer countries will lose the most relatively. This is not a bad thing fundamentally (it reverses the rich get richer trend), and is actually what's already happening, but people don't feel it. Every story that is heard about poverty reduction in China is also a story of westerners getting relatively poorer - though in absolute terms everyone is getting better quality of life.

Deskilling the workforce may be a valuable activity but those who make the best of it will be those doing the deskilling rather than those who are deskilled.

I'm not sure that the older/richer will lose out. They have a lot of political clout that they will bring to bear to keep value in their homes and retirement assets. A lot of this will be hoarded rather than redistributed so demand will continue to outstrip supply in many areas.

The 'rich' in this case are middle and upper middle classes (wealth in homes), not the uber rich (wealth in stocks), so they don't actually have that much clout (doctors, teachers etc) on the international level, and they already are losing out. Doctors are relatively poorer than in the 60s/70s.

Deskilling benefits everyone, is leads to more equitable wealth distribution. The people inventing the assembly lines (hackers) will be paid more than the assembly line worker (cloud laborers), but that's a fair reward for the effort. They won't be much richer (just like mechanical engineers who invent factory equipment) because fierce competition will prevent it (there aren't network/platform effects that lead to gates/zuckerburg).

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