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Comment by chrismear | Hacker News Reader

Standard counter-argument: someone's still got to take away the trash.

Now imagine trash bins that trundle themselves, Roomba style, to the loading lift of a DARPA-challenge AI-drone garbage truck.

The problem nowadays is not really eliminating dull work. We're pretty close to the tech level even where we haven't already reached it. The problem is figuring out an economic system that still feeds, houses and entertains people despite near 100% structural unemployment.

Somebody has to build and fix the truck.

Of course, we could automate that, too. It wouldn't be our smartest move as a species, but it'd probably be our last.

It's going to happen. Once a human's living wage starts being more costly than automation and AIs, no amount of laws and unions will hold the tide back, nor is taxing the few to support the idle many a stable state. At that point we basically have 3 choices. Contract the population to the ever-dwindling employable remnant, panic and retreat into a Luddite dark age, or switch the economy to some yet-to-be-devised ludic system.

In such a post-scarcity Asimovian future, limited socialism (perhaps 1-5% of GDP) would be a viable option. Socialism misallocates resources. But if you have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a small fraction of them?

It wouldn't necessarily be post-scarcity, since I'm envisaging linear-extrapolation robotics and narrow AI, not nanotech etc. It would be a normal (larger but not immensely so) future economy that simply didn't have any room for humans on the lower few tiers.

"But if you have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a small fraction of them?"

Because there is no society so rich that it can't misallocate even worse. Yes, I include full post-Singularity societies in that statement.

I think rather than saying "socialism can work then" or even "X can work then" for X in (socialism, anarchy, capitalism, etc.), it is rather worth saying that in that case, the foundation will have changed so radically that it is, correspondingly, time to completely reconsider society's economics from scratch.

The laws of economics will still be in play, and for a very long time there will still be the challenge of deciding which projects we wish to engage in, large and small ("which star do we colonize?"). That is not the problem that goes away. The problem that goes away is the lack of resources for basic happiness for some entity, a world we still live in.

Edit: Actually, for proof I point to modern society. We are already, not to put too fine a point on it, "fucking rich". We have massively more resources than we did even twenty years ago. Yet many of us feel poorer today, because an awful lot of that excess is getting tied up in various things that I will put under the umbrella of "economically unproductive". For instance, in the context of recent state government funding troubles, many people have observed that almost across the board state governments are spending radically more than they did in 2003, yet it hardly seems like they're performing that many more services than they did in 2003. A lot of that is because we are being terribly economically inefficient.

Health care has some of the same problems. We have radically more resources than we used to, but thanks to some systematic failures in the system (pick your choice of excessive centralization or insufficient centralization, for this point I don't care), we are spending way more than we need to. This is proved by people's ability to fly to, say, Argentina, and get virtually identical surgeries (even in a clean and safe environment) for one-tenth the price, give or take a bit. (The exact ratio doesn't matter, what matters is that it is large.)

We should be either getting massively more from our government, or paying massively less, than we did ten years ago, but we aren't. Health care expenditures may still be going up (it is a potential economic sinkhole just by its nature), but it still should be costing less per procedure than it did ten years ago, but it doesn't. (On average. There are exceptions where medicine has advanced so far that it is cheaper for some procedures.)

Unfortunately, it's just not possible to "wealth" your way out of needing to put at least some thought into economic efficiency.

(Also, I personally do not feel poorer and believe that we are still better off than twenty years ago. I am merely observing that A: I appear to be in a minority there, at least among people motivated to post in online discussions and B: we should be even better off than we actually are.)

The point I made was somewhat more limited than what I think you are arguing against. Obviously, wealth needs to be properly allocated or it is useless. However, my argument was merely that the solution to one particular problem ("how to care for people replaced by robots") would be cheap in the particular future envisioned.

Consider how this might work in modern terms. If you can't survive in the modern economy, you are provided with food and a bed to sleep in. We actually have such a system (homeless shelters + soup kitchens) and the cost of providing it is a negligible fraction of our GDP.

The problem comes when you try to add too much to this basic package, or when corruption eats up big chunks of wealth. I don't disagree with any of that.

And you are probably right about jealousy: people will feel poor when they get free health care but immortality pills are only for the rich. But that's a separate issue.

As per trash bins, imagine all materials used in all products were bio-degreadable. Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard, wait 3 months and you have fresh earth. No need for complicated garbage pick-up robots.

Simple, simple.

> Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard

Our apartment-living friends don't have back-yards.

As a youth, I tried the above strategy to deal with yard-waste, which is bio-degradable. (I did it to get out of some disposal tasks.)

It doesn't actually work.

Folks who have actually spent time in the wild will know why, or at least be able to point out how it fails. (Think trees and the like.)

Are you saying composting does not work? In Montreal, we have major universities with industrial size anaerobic digesters in the downtown core. They work there.

I'm saying that "Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard, wait 3 months and you have fresh earth" doesn't work. Size isn't isn't the only difference between "a bin in your back-yard" and "industrial size anaerobic digesters".

Take a walk in the woods. You'll see plenty of "not fresh earth" that has been dead for more than 3 months. As I discovered when I used composing to get out of some yard-waste disposal work, composting requires actual work. (I've actually done this a couple of times, the most recent with worms.)

I'm a big fan of "actually earth friendly" as opposed to feel-good. If you cherry-pick the easy stuff (mostly large metal objects), it's actually quite hard to do significantly better than a landfill. And, in a couple of decades, landfills will be a great place to find resources. (We're already harvesting methane from them and it's viable to harvest other things now.)

The US has a waste disposal "crisis" because it created one. Do the arithmetic - the total amount of trash generated in the US over decades could fit in a small corner of Nevada and no one would even notice.

Of course too much waste is produced. And of course, when I said throw it in a bin the back-yard, I left out the details of how manage a compost heap - but do you tell people to put gas in the car before starting it? I am unsure how large metal objects generate methane in a landfill. Generating methane from organic waste is not a particularly efficient form of energy production.

Reducing consumption would be a good first step. Proper product design for maximal recycling and bio-degreadable components would be a good second step. Apartment buildings could easily have digesters. You could easily have them spread out throughout a city. Until we have electric trucks with a clean electricity grid (not very common in the US), you still have a transportation issue.

> And of course, when I said throw it in a bin the back-yard, I left out the details of how manage a compost heap - but do you tell people to put gas in the car before starting it?

Actually, you said that there were no such details. I'll quote again "Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard, wait 3 months and you have fresh earth".

> I am unsure how large metal objects generate methane in a landfill.

It's unclear why you would raise that question. The discussion is about waste disposal. Few metals "compost" and since metal is often useful....

> Generating methane from organic waste is not a particularly efficient form of energy production.

Didn't say that it was, but it can be "free" energy, as can burning. Meanwhile, backyard composting simply wastes this energy.

Me - I think that recycling/reusing energy is important too.

As to the rest, you don't get to ignore costs on things that you like and ignore benefits on things that you don't like. (Refuse transportation isn't a big issue.)

But you would always have up to 3 months worth of garbage in your backyard. And what of human waste, or any waste that is unattractive stinky, or takes up too much room? There will always be a need for infrastructure. The trick is to automate the infrastructure so that humans can be employed on more productive work.

This is why I support automated checkout stands at stores. By automating jobs away, there are more people capable of doing things that we can't automate yet, and more money available to pay them. Example: a store installs the automated checkout stands and reduces the number of cashiers from 4 to 1. Assuming the automated stands cost $0 to maintain (not true, but the cost I believe is trending that way) then the store can have those 3 displaced employees work the store helping customers find what they need. There are now 3 extra people working at a zero net cost to the company.

I think you over-estimate the creativity of the MBA class, particularly in public companies.

While people with imagination and empathy for customers might see this as a worthwhile idea, which would actually positively benefit both the customers and the business, in the rarefied air of balance sheets and "strategy", I'd bet a brick to London that those extra three people would be seen as a cost, and would be made redundant at the first opportunity.

I understand this point, but I kept them hired in my example to illustrate how extra production value is realized when systems are automated like this. I do believe that those 3 employees would be let go. My point is that those 3 employees could go on to be productive in some other capacity in a situation where automation can't yet replace them. They would probably work for another company, but the point remains that there are now 3 extra workers in society.

At the extreme end of this argument I can see a Matrix-esque existence where everyone is "plugged in" like so many electronics in a home.

Past labor-saving technologies have not increased structural unemployment. People found other things to do.

Perhaps eventually this will change. It sounds like you think it will. Why?

People could move up, because a very large proportion of the labor force was working jobs below their intellectual limits. I think we in the "first world" are a decade or two off the point where this slack pulls taut. At the moment it's mostly experienced as meritocratic good - everybody now has the freedom to reach as high as their native abilities permit. But automation isn't going to stop. The replacement of humans in an economic tier which was fully taut will leave those people with nowhere to go - they can't rise, or they would already have done so. Short of supertech IQ boosters, they're permanently surplus to requirements.

That's in there too, but basically the idea is a lot less work, as in 99% less.

It reminds me of geography class when I was younger and I learned about the primary, secondary and tertiary parts of the economy. We were taught that economies with a large tertiary sector were "better". The tertiary economy mainly produces goods that are not fundamentally important to peoples lives. (Although obviously I think peoples lives are better than they were 50 years ago when it comes to longevity and other health issues, that's not what I'm getting at.)

With developed economies, there were two options that I can see. One was to lessen work hours and maintain consumption levels as technology improved, and the other option, which exists today, is to keep work hours the same (or increase them in many cases), and create more jobs in the services sector, which in turn requires more consumption to keep everything going.

I saw two options instead of two choices, because people were never given this choice.

Basically I think it boils down to this: You can work your ass off to buy stuff you mostly don't need and make someone else rich, or you can be an anti-consumerist, work less and...do whatever you want?

And the Fourier-ist counter-counter-argument is everyone takes away the trash sometimes.

I call my solution to this the "Panera model" everyone clears their own tables instead of requiring bus boys. Same thing would happen for other non satisfying jobs.

I agree this is the ideal method; however, there will be people who will refuse to clear their table/throw away their trash ... then others will look over and say if he isn't doing it, why should I?

The reply from the restaurant owner would likely be:

1. You bought X, so you now own X, including all its waste products

2. Leaving things you own in places you don't, where other people have to dispose of them, is littering, a crime

What if I'm willing to pay someone $2 to clear my table, and someone else is willing to clear it for $2?

Are you going to say that we can't engage in this voluntary transaction? Because this is basically the system we have in place now and a lot of people are willing to pay and be paid.

I agree. I think that after automation, whatever residue of crap jobs in society should be shared in an equitable way. Participatory Economics (parecon for short) offers one decentralized way of doing this; maybe people know of others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

What trash?

If everybody just ceased work at once (no cheating, breathing is also work!) then all our problems would be solved within minutes. No more trash either.

I propose the author goes first. We sheeple need a proof of concept.

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