Comment by pyoung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyoung | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Taking your example a step further (and subsequently bringing it into a more modern context), what happens to those jobs when Google (or someone) builds a mass production driver-less car? Sure, a few thousand engineers will be employed, but that's barely going to put a dent in the millions of taxi/truck/delivery drivers that now find themselves out of work.

This is a matter of opinion, as none of us can predict the future, but I believe that one of the purposes and goals of technology is to replace and reduce the drudgery of human labor. If I was a VC, I would be investing in almost any labor-replacing tech startup that came across my desk because the market for the tech has already been validated (companies paying for the labor) and you are bringing a more efficient solution to that market. You believe that this process somehow results in more jobs. I believe, baring massive changes in the education and social infrastructures, that this process inevitably leads to fewer jobs.

>what happens to those jobs when Google (or someone) builds a mass production driver-less car?

Lots of people will no longer be employed in low-productivity jobs of driving vehicles. That is exactly what will happen.

>as none of us can predict the future

Correct. And Henry ford didn't foresee Pizza delivery.

>You believe that this process somehow results in more jobs

The process creates higher productivity. Higher productivity leads to higher living standards and more jobs in aggregate, though not for the affected workers.

> I believe, baring massive changes in the education and social infrastructures, that this process inevitably leads to fewer jobs.

For this to be true, you must explain why this time it is different.

It's not the fact that a few thousand engineers replace millions of drivers. It's the fact that the increased productivity drives down the cost of things. The increased productivity also releases human capital and actual capital to pursue new things and create new jobs. This leads to new jobs in entirely new industries. It's comment to lament and say 'what are these new industries going to be?'. But as already stated - nobody can see the future. We don't know, but we must accept that it will happen, simply by looking at all of human history. The fashionable argument currently is that you need to reform education to make this possible, but other large-scale changes in technology have happened when people usually didn't finish high school. When a person needs to learn new skills, they generally find a way of doing so.

>The increased productivity also releases human capital and actual capital to pursue new things and create new jobs. This leads to new jobs in entirely new industries.

Correct, but it doesn't necessarily result in an equal number of or more jobs than before.

>but we must accept that it will happen, simply by looking at all of human history.

This is where I think we disagree the most. I don't think history sets a good precedent for predicting the future, especially in this current environment. At no point in history have we had robots and AI. We still don't have that now, and there are no guarantees that we will fully achieve AI, but in many areas we are making humans obsolete and I expect this trend to continue. Using your eariler analogy, what happened to the horses after Ford introduced mass produced cars? They were turned to glue. In many ways, this is the issue we are currently facing.

I do agree that highly skilled and entrepreneurial folks will create new industries which could dramatically alter the economic landscape, but I am still not convinced that this is going to result in full employment. These new industries will still be taking advantage of the highly automated and efficient technologies that other industries use and lower-skilled and less educated people are going to find it increasingly difficult to find work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com