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Comment by unono | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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