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Comment by dm8 | Hacker News Reader

> The gap in training and social groups above and below could mean that new automation technology causes sudden, large-scale unemployment.

This also scares me. I've often wondered, what will happen to people in a largely automated world (which could be reality in next 40-50 years). Will there be riots as employment will be unprecedented? Will it open new industries or entirely new period of creativity for humanity (e.g. industrial age giving birth to age of information)?

When we transitioned to industrial age, I believe people had similar concerns but somehow things worked out well. Can we repeat that?

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The idea that "work" is somehow good and noble is outdated, and serves only to trap workers into undesirable situations for the profit of the capitalist class. Work isn't noble, it's just something we do so that we can do other stuff (and eat).

So preserving work in the face of massive changes in the economy would be an incredibly unfortunate thing to do. Why not simply allocate social resources such that people who are not needed for work simply don't have to work? Allow them to have food, and shelter, and healthcare, and let them explore whatever it is that brings them happiness, without having to worry about spending their days performing some menial task because someone has decided that they must "work" for their meals.

This. We are already living in a post-scarcity world, but we keep pretending that we aren't. Eventually the number of unemployed people will be so large that we won't be able to ignore the problem of excess labor.

what evidence do you have that we are in a post scarcity world?

Petroleum is running out, lots of places are being desertified, and arable land is shrinking, leading to places with food shortages. Until the day a very cheap, completely renewable (or effectively infinite) source of energy is found (such as cold fusion, or vacuum energy), there will be no post-scarcity.

citation-needed for all the above claims. Peak oil predictions have been made since the 1880s. Technology and better ecological understanding keep providing us with better methods to fight against desertification. Food production capabilities are growing exponentially. etc.

I think that the major evidence for our post scarcity world is that, in developed countries, a small fraction of the population is actually involved in agriculture and manufacturing (and that percentage is shrinking).

To quote Gibson "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed".

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...

Why not simply allocate social resources such that people who are not needed for work simply don't have to work?

There's been quite some hand wringing over this issue in the UK in recent years with people on long term sickness welfare or other long term welfare programs.

The populist view is that these people "should" be working and don't "deserve" to be subsidized full time because they haven't "contributed" to the system. But if they are genuinely of as little use to the workforce as it seems, does such a stigma to not working really make any sense?

> But if they are genuinely of as little use to the workforce as it seems, does such a stigma to not working really make any sense?

in the natural world, if they are genuinely of as little use, they "should die", for the resources to keep them alive is more than the "profit" that they can generate. This is becoming more and more true with more and more automation - the cost of resources to keep somebody alive is getting to a point where their contributions don't really cover it. I dont know if there is a real solution to this problem.

The issue (well there are lots of issues but this one is pertinent to this discussion) with that line of thinking is when people in general become so inefficient compared to machines that it's more efficient and profitable to get rid of the people entirely since machines are so much more efficient.

And yet, in the natural world, you will find that taking their lives will be quite difficult, and will reveal the forgotten strength they possess which the modern industrial economy does not value: survival.

It is easy to get caught up in hypotheticals, and forget that we are all primates in rags scrambling to survive.

Work can be ennobling, morally beneficial, etc. but instances in which this is actually the case tend to be few and far between. The ones that do exist invariably grant the worker a high degree of autonomy and decent living wage.

If good jobs like these are available to everyone then sure, denigrate the people who are reluctant to work for a living. But as long as most work is shit work for shit managers done for shit wages, then insisting that people work for a living on moral grounds is, in fact, the antithesis of morality.

We tried that. It ended in disaster.

People thinking like this really makes me furious. This is such a narcisistic thinking, that I feel disgusted.

Human beings are driven by incentives. From drinking a glass of water, to writing a book it is all incentive based. If you have your basic needs covered, you have no incentives. When you make policy, you have to think about the lowest common denominator, not the select few top speciments. It is extremely vain and naive to think removing incentives to educate yourself and work will end in anything other than disaster. Apart from that, the model you describe fosters enormous corruption at every level of society. From the factory workers who go drunk to work and steal, because when everyone is a principal, noone is a principal, to the political leaders who engage in atrocities to keep and grow their power.

PLEASE stop trying to make communism happen. It has destroyed so many lives already.

If you have your basic needs covered, you have no incentives.

Self-betterment is an incentive. Betterment of everyone else is an incentive. The idea that people must be forced to work to make money or else they won't do anything else is a capitalist ideal, NOT absolute fact.

Wouldn't it be nice if people could actually do things that interest them instead of worrying about putting food on the table?

Self-betterment is an incentive for you and maybe the people you are friends with.

It is an incentive for some amount of people - the larger question, how many, has insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

This mechanism of entitlements and requirements and such enshrined by capitalism is deeply engrained, but it is not above challenge.

Living in Norway taught me that faceless charity embitters and dissatisfies most recipients. Far from considering how to better themselves, too many internalize their implied uselessness, while blindly groping for someone or something to blame. An obvious path to self worth is then to view oneself as intelligent for taking from the hard working sheeple too dumb or deluded to win.

Charity to help someone achieve their goals is very different from payouts for having no aspirations or abilities.

What if that's the result of being charity (to those in need)?

Right now, there's a divide which separates the "useful" - who get a salary - from the "useless" - who get a pension -, which leads to those feelings of alienation and self-deprecation. But does anyone feel useless because they didn't have to work for the sunlight they get, or the air they breath?

I'm not affirming anything, but it'd interesting to know if the problem you identified would disappear if everyone got those resources, instead of just those "in need".

No, "we" didn't try anything. Please stop assuming that a few corrupt governments "trying" to do something vaguely similar to what was suggested half a century ago and failing implies that it simply doesn't work ever under any conditions.

Maybe not under any conditions but the conditions are not met, maybe never will be. Simply because you were born, doesn't mean you are entitled to anything. Is a lion entitled to anything when it is born? Yes, we humans strive to be better than lions. This doesn't mean we've achieved that yet.

> Simply because you were born, doesn't mean you are entitled to anything.

The United States and most of the rest of civilization disagrees with this statement. We call the things you are entitled to "human rights" and while there may be disagreement as to which rights ought to be applied, it is a completely radical view to claim that society should not offer any basic protections. It is from the complex interplay of society that we obtain our unique and impressive powers, this is why lions are not running shit on this planet.

> Maybe not under any conditions but the conditions are not met, maybe never will be.

Maybe so, but a key point is that the conditions have not been met anywhere where people tried to force socialist revolutions. The idea that you could manage to make socialist revolutions work in underdeveloped agrarian economies stems from people like Lenin and Mao, not Marx. Marx, on the contrary warned against it decades before.

> Simply because you were born, doesn't mean you are entitled to anything.

There you are in violent agreement with Marx.

Marx spent a lot of effort arguing against the idea of a welfare system that would give everyone the same without contributing. E.g. in. Critique of the Gotha Programme, he goes as far as pointing out that too much emphasis had been put on redistribution and "fair distribution" and points out various unintended consequences of the proposed program that he saw as counterproductive to the development of socialism and later communism.

One of the most famous tenets of Marxism is exactly "from each according to ability, to each according to need". There's nothing there about being entitled to anything just for being born. On the contrary, there is an expectation of duty. Only those totally unable to contribute are left off the hook if they want to expect society to in help.

The "welfare entitlement" comes from the social democrats - the beginnings of which were the main influence Marx was arguing against in Critique of the Gotha Programme.

>from each according to ability, to each according to need

I was born and live in a post-soviet country. Born exactly when the communist regime (supposedly) fell. I know this slogan very well. The problem with it is that when everyone is a principal, noone is a principal.

It's not about economic development, but philosophical one. People (and all of nature) is in constant movement. From trees spreading seeds, to endorphins in the human brain when you achieve success. If you remove this reward system from the social framework people just stop caring. If you don't have a carrot to chase, you stop walking. You see this very clearly when you manage people in any capacity. What you are left with then, is a very, very small group of people involved in making the decisions, contrary to any syndicalism thought. Soon those few people get intoxicated by the power and corruption, in all its forms, erodes the whole system. Slowly, but painfully.

When you make policy, you have to be very careful and cautious. It's one thing to have horizontal structure in Valve and 37signals, where pre-selection means you already are in the top 1% of speciments. Thinking you can translate that success to the other 99% of the population is naive and vain. Vanity is certainly devil's most favorite sin.

> It has destroyed so many lives already.

So has capitalism. What's your point?

Just because something was done poorly in the past doesn't mean we can't iterate and improve. Capitalism has no ready answer for some of the problems we are beginning to face. Eventually people like you are going to have to admit that Marx was definitely right about at least one thing: socio-economic class is a critical social cleavage that drives much of history.

So unless capitalism figures out a way to pull its stubborn head out of the sand and deal with its own shortcomings to prevent society from tearing itself apart, we're going to get a chance to find out whether Marx was right about anything else.

Communism lacks understanding of the human nature. It fails to recognize that humans are sometimes apathetic, vile and corrupt. Darwin's theory does not apply only to evolution pre homo sapiens. It manifests in all of nature. Communism refutes that theory at it's very core and removes the mechanism society rewards individuals for following their instinct. In fact, it punishes them for it.

Communism/socialsm has noble ideas. But those ideas live in a silo. When they touch reality everything shatters.

The problem with your thinking is that you ignore the fact that socialist policies have been implemented successfully in all modern western democracies and somehow those societies haven't shattered yet. It's called a "mixed economy" and you're living in one right now.

The idea that we have to construct a society based on idealistic absolutes is nonsense. Some problems are more efficiently solved collectively, others are better solved by the power of the market. Let's harness the power of both.

If the day comes when AI abruptly puts huge percentages of the population out of work and our society faces collapse, one can easily envision a solution that implements structural changes that incorporates both the benefits of market forces and the efficiencies of collective resource pooling.

Not sure full employment is any kind of worthy goal at all. How about: utopia, where we all have what we need and some of what we want, at no personal cost?

Agreed. But this takes two steps:

Step 1) Increase taxes on income above a certain level, create a floor that eliminates poverty (hunger, homelessness, etc). Continue to incentivize progress so that we continue on the path currently forged by science and technology (I don't believe this crowd requires me to expound on this)

Step 2) Use renewable energy and technology to provide "what we need and some of what we want, at no personal cost" to everyone.

Both transitions are going to be terribly painful.

I enjoy Keynes on this in 1930 -- http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf -- remembering, of course, that unforeseen economic shocks make predicting the course of implementation nearly impossible. In his case, it was WW2.

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