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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

I don't think pmarca is saying people are against robots per se, but against the efficiency-driven unemployment they see. I'm firmly on the side of pmarca and technology here -- I'd love to see virtually all crappy jobs today disappear, and we could find new and better things for those people to do (through the market, ideally, but I'd be open to Basic Income or other forms of wealth distribution if needed).

I cannot imagine retarding technology just to preserve existing jobs being a winning strategy which makes the world better. If we did that in the 1700s, there would only be a few thousand people left over after primary agriculture to do anything else. That would suck.

People holding unionized or otherwise protected jobs are rent-seekers (albeit on a smaller scale than large companies in regulated industries). Rent seekers do not make the world a better place.

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>I'd love to see virtually all crappy jobs today disappear,

On that note, Graeber is fun to read on this topic http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

>I cannot imagine retarding technology just to preserve existing jobs being a winning strategy which makes the world better.

Well… that depends on the distribution of income, doesn't it? If my choice is between Elysium and the world of today, I'd rather stay put thank you very much.

The key criticism here is that there is a vast legal and cultural machinery in place that overwhelmingly benefits those who already have some form of wealth and that it is this class of people who disproportionately benefit - to the detriment of non capital holders.

I'm willing to accept a techno utopia where _everyone_ benefits and not one in which all the efficiency gains automation has to give accrue to a lucky few.

Of course, you should take that Graeber article with a few grains of salt, given that he also wrote this:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages

>I cannot imagine retarding technology just to preserve existing jobs being a winning strategy which makes the world better.

The problem is accelerating technology doesn't make the world automatically better either.

It can also make it patently worse. E.g, someone presses the red button, and here's a nuclear war. Or some idiot gets access to viruses, and here's a bio attack that wipes out half the population. It's technology that will have enabled both. Actually, the number of people that have died in World War I and II (from the mustard gas to Belsen and from Dresden to Hiroshima) is already tens of millions -- all due to improved technological efficiency.

Compared to that kind of harm to the whole of humanity, some people getting an "artificial heart", a guy walking on the moon, and being able to exchange IMs with WhatsApp on one's mobile is not that much of an balance at all. Just something to keep in mind, lest someone thinks technology is all just "embetterment".

>People holding unionized or otherwise protected jobs are rent-seekers (albeit on a smaller scale than large companies in regulated industries). Rent seekers do not make the world a better place.

Quite the opposite. Protected jobs stop the madness of everything going forward for the sake of going forward, and ask for real improvements to the lives and treatment of real people. It's only a problem when the protection is to a small subclass of people, instead of extending to all workers. We have the 8-hour work day (well, had), we've had booming middle classes, and we've had safety laws and child labor laws because of those "unions" and protests. America was better in the fifties, middle class wise, when unions were strong, compared to what it's now.

It didn't hurt that in the 50s American industry was reaping the benefits of having blown their industrial competitors to smithereens just a few years earlier.

I can offer all the benefits you want if the odds of my products' prices being undercut by a competitor are roughly zero.

>I can offer all the benefits you want if the odds of my products' prices being undercut by a competitor are roughly zero.

Sweden, Denmark and co seem to be able to offer "all the benefits you want" (and them some) even with lots of competitors being able to undercut them.

It's not like a country is like a shop in a commercial street with competing shops around it, and only the rules of competition hold.

There are also laws we make and consciously shaping on the environment we operate on. Like, say, tarrifs and subsidies.

And it's funny that those are taboo in America, when most of the success of the American economy is the result of a sort of "subsidy" of having a huge military presence and diplomatic pressure (not to mention the actual huge subsidies, to farmers, Detroit, Wall Street et co, shadowing any "socialist" country's GDP spending).

> Compared to that kind of harm to the whole of humanity, some people getting an "artificial heart", a guy walking on the moon, and being able to exchange IMs with WhatsApp on one's mobile is not that much of an balance at all. Just something to keep in mind, lest someone thinks technology is all just "embetterment".

Woah, what? Are you really saying that the negative uses of technology in the World Wars have outweighed the positive uses of technology (even if we limit ourselves to a timeframe that contains an unusual amount of war deaths)? It's beyond ridiculous to reduce the benefits of technology to "some guy" getting an artificial heart, the moonwalk (which depending on your perspective is either a prestige achievement or a step towards space exploration whose benefits we haven't seen yet), and a messaging app. I really, really hope you're being disingenuous instead of just ignorant because I'm practically rendered speechless at the thought of having to explain how electrification alone has saved countless lives.

OTOH, I guess I shouldn't be that surprised, since it seems to be a very common phenomenon for people to ignore steady long-term effects in favor of flashier one-offs, even if the latter has a tiny, tiny, tiny cumulative effect in comparison.

As just a couple of examples (I tried to focus on things that would be the most affected by technological/scientific/economic progress):

- The five-year mortality rate of breast cancer today is roughly the same as the mortality rate of GIVING BIRTH in 1900 (also known as something damn near half the population does, several times in their life).

- The Spanish flu infected 500 million and killed 100 million people in 1918. Today you can go to Safeway and get a flu shot for 10 bucks.

- In the early 20th century, the life expectancy at birth was 31 years of age. In 2010 it was 67 years.

- Per CDC data, 60 years ago, 38000 people died of polio each year in America alone. These days, 300 people die of polio per year in the ENTIRE WORLD.

- From 1920 to 1980, 395/10000 people died from famine each year. In 200, that number was THREE out of every 10000.

Of course I agree with the larger point that's tangential to the one you're making: blind progress without ethical safeguards is definitely foolish. That's not really what this discussion is about at all though (there are people already talking about the need for ethical standards around AI development and I'm the first to agree with that).

> America was better in the fifties, middle class wise, when unions were strong, compared to what it's now.

This is so incredibly ignorant of history that it's unbelievable. You're aware there was a World War right before the 50's, right? And damn near the entire world was either coming out of centuries of suppressed economies under colonialism or trying to recover from being, you know, blown up? Might that have _anything_ to do with the success of American labor (it's not a coincidence that the opening of developing-world markets in the 70s and 80s coincided with the loss of America's unskilled-labor competitiveness)? Not to mention the fact that "middle-class wise" is an incredibly idiotic metric to use as a proxy for "better". Refer back to the list I had above for examples of _real_ ways that lives can improve (or seriously, just Google it: you can literally find HUNDREDS of ways life was worse back then, even if you limit yourself to the 50s and to America). The places that we _have_ gotten much worse (i.e. economic prospects for lower and lower-middle classes) is amply addressed by the grandparent comment's allusion to a proper welfare state and basic income. To put it another way, retarding progress so people can have pretend-productive jobs could not be stupider; through inefficiency, you're destroying wealth that can be redistributed to people who actually need it instead of to people who happen to hold arbitrary obsolete jobs. What you're fundamentally saying is that we should implement welfare in the most inefficient way possible and then give it not to the poor, or the sick, or the needy; but to people in arbitrary industries (like dockworkers or taxi drivers) at arbitrary income levels.

I think he was referring to the negative effects of technology such as global warming, pollution from fertilizers, chemicals and plastics, poor farm conditions, tainted food supplies, weapons, citizen spy technology, etc.

That was beside the point though because your point is still valid that the "good" technology, which is hopefully the point of most technology, should not be held back for such superficial reasons. As someone smart once said, why should we build single man operated bulldozers when we can hire 10,000 men with spoons to do the digging?

>Woah, what? Are you really saying that the negative uses of technology in the World Wars have outweighed the positive uses of technology (even if we limit ourselves to a timeframe that contains an unusual amount of war deaths)?

I gave the World Wars as an example. Perhaps you missed the part where I also mentioned possible outcomes like a full on nuclear war (enabled by technology etc). And of course, there's also climate change and such. Or even simple rampant deaths due to overuse of antibiotics.

Compared to such ability (and possibility) to wipe all humanity, the "decline in the mortality rate of giving birth" is not that much impressive.

Not to mention it has little to do with any advanced technology, and more with simple precautions, like running water, cleaner birth environments, etc. You can get over 80% of the decrease in the infant mortality rate just by those, and in fact many activists in third world countries do exactly that -- not much modern equipment required.

>This is so incredibly ignorant of history that it's unbelievable. You're aware there was a World War right before the 50's, right? And damn near the entire world was either coming out of centuries of suppressed economies under colonialism or trying to recover from being, you know, blown up? Might that have _anything_ to do with the success of American labor?

For one, there was also a World War right before the 20s, with the large colonial powers striving to recover from it. Still what happened to US economy in the 20s/30s was not exactly beneficial.

Second, the success of the American labor is not tied to the success of the American laborers. You can have one without the other. And for a century or more, since early 19th century, you did have -- tons of Americans working in medieval conditions (including harsh child labor, even in coal mines, and of course actual slavery), while the American industry was increasingly booming.

>What you're fundamentally saying is that we should implement welfare in the most inefficient way possible and then give it not to the poor, or the sick, or the needy; but to people in arbitrary industries (like dockworkers or taxi drivers) at arbitrary income levels.

What I'm fundamentally saying is that the "market knows better" is borderline religious fatalism. People shape and create their society, and people decide what it will be. Most people, if they are empowered to, or few people, if they can control legislation, education, markets etc.

Nobody gives money to the "poor, or the sick, or the needy" that are taken from "dockworkers or taxi drivers". What happens is that the "dockworkers or taxi drivers" are instead thrown into the ranks of the "poor or the needy".

And not only because their work gets obsolete or trivial by technology -- but because people controlling the market can force them to squeeze their margins.

Let me put it this way: it wasn't because growing cotton was cheap "in itself" or trivial that the cotton industry people thrived and prices were low. It was because they could push human beings to do it for substinence level compensation. Throu raw force first (slavery) and through "law" and taking advantate of their situation later then (Jim Crow etc).

> I gave the World Wars as an example. Perhaps you missed the part where I also mentioned possible outcomes like a full on nuclear war (enabled by technology etc). And of course, there's also climate change and such. Or even simple rampant deaths due to overuse of antibiotics.

Oh.my.god. Can you really be so clueless as to use antibiotics overuse as an example of the BAD side of technology? I think I actually might die of laughter. It blows my mind that you don't realize that the worst-case scenario of antibiotics overuse is that every antibiotic will become useless...i.e. taking us back to the situation before antibiotics were developed. Your example of "a nightmare scenario of science and technology" is "going back to before this technological advance existed". If I wasn't convinced before, I'm 100% certain that you're truly way, way, way out of your depth when trying to comprehend this topic.

> Not to mention it has little to do with any advanced technology, and more with simple precautions, like running water, cleaner birth environments, etc. You can get over 80% of the decrease in the infant mortality rate just by those, and in fact many activists in third world countries do exactly that -- not much modern equipment required.

Oh you're totally right, and the scientific advances and (relatively) huge amount of resources required to bring these things to the entire world had nothing to do with science, technological advances, or economic growth. I...how do you think these things happen exactly? Do you think that God pops down every twenty years and drops off another set of stone tablets with a list of scientific discoveries and inventions? I've officially crossed over from finding this hilarious to finding it terrifying that there are people who think the way you do.

> What I'm fundamentally saying is that the "market knows better" is borderline religious fatalism.

Do tell how "We should have a complete and robust safety net" is anywhere close to religious fanaticism around "the market knows better"? AFAICT, what I'm talking about is leveraging the market's strength (making local decisions about cost, price, and efficiency) AND avoiding its weaknesses/leveraging govt's strengths (dealing with externalities, providing safety nets, etc). How the fuck is that more fanatic than your proposal of ignoring the market's ability to do anything and making _everyone_ poorer in the process?

> Nobody gives money to the "poor, or the sick, or the needy" that are taken from "dockworkers or taxi drivers". What happens is that the "dockworkers or taxi drivers" are instead thrown into the ranks of the "poor or the needy".

Oh holy fuck what are you even saying. If unemployed dockworkers and taxi drivers become poor and needy, then _by definition they're covered by the robust safety net for the needy jesus christ_. The whole idea behind a safety net is that there ARE no needy people because they're taken care of. If someone in a replaced industry happens to be independently wealthy, or married to someone who makes a decent amount of money, or hell just rich from their protected job, you'd have to have the brain capacity of a toddler to think that it makes sense for welfare transfers to go to them (and make no mistake, protecting obsolete jobs is a transfer of wealth AND a net destructor of wealth). If you think this is impossible, just take a look at what percentage of farm subsidies goes to the very wealthy owners of huge agribusinesses. Giving money to random job classes independently of need in the hopes that it will roughly line up with the needy is _fucking stupid_ compared to actually just giving money to the needy. I can't imagine what sort of bizarro-world one would have to live in where that sounds like it makes any sense.

> Let me put it this way: it wasn't because growing cotton was cheap "in itself" or trivial that the cotton industry people thrived and prices were low. It was because they could push human beings to do it for substinence level compensation. Throu raw force first (slavery) and through "law" and taking advantate of their situation later then (Jim Crow etc).

Right.....which is an excellent argument for outlawing slavery and Jim Crow. I definitely agree that there are jobs out there right now that only exist because they people are driven to work them by the whole "needing food and shelter" thing. How in God's name is that not completely addressed by "a robust safety net"? Shit it's the DEFINITION of "a robust safety net".

TL;DR: I've yet to hear a single credible argument between "1) Maximize the amount of wealth society has, by not intentionally gimping productivity (education funding etc is also part of this, as is welfare et al but this connection is murkier to explain). 2) Use this wealth (by taxing wherever can take it: the rich have historically low top tax rates atm so that's naturally a good place to start) to redistribute to those who actually need it. By definition, this means a robust safety net and ideally a basic income. This is made much easier by the excess amount of wealth generated by step 1.

>Oh.my.god. Can you really be so clueless as to use antibiotics overuse as an example of the BAD side of technology? I think I actually might die of laughter. It blows my mind that you don't realize that the worst-case scenario of antibiotics overuse is that every antibiotic will become useless...i.e. taking us back to the situation before antibiotics were developed. Your example of "a nightmare scenario of science and technology" is "going back to before this technological advance existed". If I wasn't convinced before, I'm 100% certain that you're truly way, way, way out of your depth when trying to comprehend this topic.

You keep writing insults and empty boasts. Is this for the good of the discussion, or so that you feel better for yourself? You could have answered the same thing as above without all the BS ad hominens -- which don't matter anyway, because your core logic is faulty. (Also, "oh.my.god"? Seriously? Are you like 12 years old?).

For one, the "worst case scenario" from overuse of antibiotics is not just "that every antibiotic will become useless".

You missed the whole part of the overuse having first created more-resistant strains -- and a humanity with less resistance from being over-dependent on antibiotics for all these decades.

So, no it's not just "back to square one". It's "back to square one with our shoelaces tied together and a tiger hunting us".

>Oh holy fuck what are you even saying. If unemployed dockworkers and taxi drivers become poor and needy, then _by definition they're covered by the robust safety net for the needy jesus christ_.

Only in some fantasy world where the "robust safety net" exists. In the real world, when they become poor and needy, e.g by taxi companies or competition squeezing their margins, they just become poor and needy, end of story.

>* How in God's name is that not completely addressed by "a robust safety net"? Shit it's the DEFINITION of "a robust safety net".*

I don't disagree with the "robust safety net".

I simply aknowledge that it doesn't exist.

Which means that in real life throwing whole professions to live with diminished wages and be taken advantage of because of their need is not automatically taken care of by any (non-existant) "safety net".

You cannot say some real and existing abuse is OK because those people can be taken care of because of an imaginary and not-yet-existing safety net.

I don't think that's really the point of al3x's post. I think it's more we should be very worried that someone with such a balck & white, infantile view of society and economy is in a position to throw billions of dollars at advancing his world view.

I love technology but fear for the world we'll end up with if people like pmarca are left to pull the levers.

I would sure rather have pmarca pulling the levers rather than people like {politicians, bankers, ...}.

What makes you think pmarca is different than {anybody with lots of money and are human being with desires}

He's fundamentally a nerd, and optimistic about humanity. That's enough to be better than 95% of people in power.

That sounds like you presume he's like you, so he's OK.

That's actually wrong. I'm not optimistic about humanity. pmarca seems to be, which is why I like reading him (and Thiel, etc.), even though I don't totally believe everything they say. I think the world would be better with more pmarcas, though.

I may be a nerd, but I'm willing to bet basically everyone on HN shares that trait.

He isn't backed by the coercive power of the state, for one thing.

Owners of capital and private property don't rely on the coercive power of the state to maintain their ownership? News to me.

How about neither of the above :) I'd prefer that.

I'm genuinely curious why you think that he has a black and white view of society. It seems like the one-dimensional, black-and-white technocrat view you're ascribing to him wouldn't be in full support of "creating an sustaining a vigorous social safety net", right? The only arguments I've ever heard against "Don't hamper technological progress but provide a robust safety net to take care of those left behind" are the kind of blatantly cynical strawmen used in the article:

> Meanwhile, we don’t need to wait until a hypercapitalist techno-utopia emerges to do right by our struggling neighbors. We could make the choice to pay for universal health care, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow. Instead, you’re kicking the can down the road and hoping the can will turn into a robot with a market solution.

Isn't that Andreessen's whole fucking point? From reading his remarks, it seems evident that he _does_ think that we should "vote to pay for universal healthcare, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow". Who the hell said anything about _waiting_ for a hypercapitalist utopia? And how the hell is a "vigorous social safety net" hypercapitalist?

My feeling is "Don't hamper technological progress but provide a robust safety net to take care of those left behind" is itself a straw man. No one is hampering technological progress. Instead a lot of people are (correctly imho) not willing to blindly succumb to it on a promise from those at the top that it will all work out in the end. Everyone is a stake holder in society and entitled to their own fears, hopes and beliefs. pmarca has his, the guy about to be replaced by a robot does too. A responsible society listens to both and figures out an equitable compromise. The problem is pmarca has billions of dollars available to bolster his position in the debate. The guy on the factory flaw does not. A second problem (for me at least) is that what pmarca says and what pmarca does often appear to be two different things.

> My feeling is "Don't hamper technological progress but provide a robust safety net to take care of those left behind" is itself a straw man.

> No one is hampering technological progress.

I'm sorry, but this could not be more wrong. This is what the entire conversation is _about_. Protecting jobs that do things less efficiently (higher cost, lower output, worse quality by some other metric, whatever) is a HUGE topic of discussion and something that a lot of the country still thinks makes sense[1], despite the fact that it transfers wealth from arbitrary consumers (even the poor) to arbitrary workers (regardless of income), and destroys wealth overall. I've yet to hear a single credible argument for why this is not infinitely worse than maximizing the total amount of wealth (by using the best tool for each job, be it robots or workers) and then explicitly redistributing it the way we want (so transfers will come from e.g. the rich and go to those who need it, like the poor and the sick). The arbitrary, untargeted welfare system that protecting inefficient jobs entails is obviously going to give you a lot more people receiving transfers who don't need it (i.e. middle-to-high income) and a lot more people losing wealth who do need it (consumers who have low incomes).

It is a very important point (and one that I've given a lot of thought to) that obsoleting people's jobs _requires_ the robust safety net for them (which we simply don't have in the US), and going full-speed ahead with technology while failing to implement the safety net can be dangerous. That's just an argument for pushing that much harder for a robust safety net (which is something any reasonable person in the US has been doing for decades, at least). Even this distinction is irrelevant when we're talking about someone's view of what the optimal solution would be: you start from an optimal solution (don't intentionally gimp productivity, use the gains from higher productivity to provide a safety net for those who get left behind) and then try to push it through the layers of politics etc that's required to get it actually working. Shouting it down at the ideas phase is just gonna end up with a system where

[1] c.f. all the complaints about replacing workers with robots in factories etc

> I'd love to see virtually all crappy jobs today disappear, and we could find new and better things for those people to do

I agree with you, but I won't share your optimism until I start seeing way more ideas for what this future would look like that are way less hand-wavy than what I've seen so far. Vonnegut's "Player Piano" feels a lot more familiar than Star Trek's no-scarcity-or-need-to-work-but-everything-is-amazing.

This is an interesting vision. Not concrete in a lot of ways, but you a lot of the core ideas seem at least somewhat plausible: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

The first story seems more plausible than the second, but I hope the future looks more like the second.

> we could find new and better things for those people to do

I do not think this is universally true.

I don't think we could necessarily say "hey everyone, do whatever you want" and get more productivity out of most people, but I do think a lot of people would be happier, even if less productive.

If we can enslave atoms/the sun/computers/etc., and use the surplus from that to let some people be less productive than they otherwise would be if forced, but at the same time let other people be massively more productive than if forced to cover basic subsistence, we might be better off.

(I'd sure prefer if "the next Einstein" got to work in a cushy academic/office job while doing his thinking on the side, than if he were working 20h/day in a coal mine to support himself, leaving no time for anything else.)

So I'd use "better" in the sense of "people would individually be happier", and also that the absolute returns might be higher overall -- mainly because a billion people receiving a small subsidy on net productivity which trends toward zero actual cost are insignificant cost compared to be benefit of some thousands or hundreds of thousands being massively productive rather than a tiny bit net productive.

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