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Comment by jdreaver | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, it would be unfortunate to lose your job to a machine, but oftentimes people fail to see the upside: if a robot can do a job more cheaply than a human, then whatever that robot produces is then cheaper for everyone else to buy! If most of the economy were efficiently automated, then you would barely need an income to survive or thrive.

Machines do not decrease your productivity. Just because a machine can make a shoe faster than you doesn't mean you can't make a shoe. If a machine can make houses in a day, that doesn't make your house will spontaneously combust because you made it inefficiently. Labor-saving machines only add to the productivity of society.

People have been losing jobs to tech since the dawn of civilization. It does suck if your job is automated out, but the overall good to society can't be denied.

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"People have been losing jobs to tech since the dawn of civilization."

I hear this all the time, but we really need to think about the _length_of_time_ these technology transitions of the past took before the human labor became irrelevant and displaced.

Go and look up how many hundreds of years it took for the printing press to become widely used across the globe--seriously. It's more than a human's lifetime, let alone more time than would be required to learn a new trade.

The job displacement that we're going to be faced with in the future will be cross-industry, and take the least amount of time of any technology transition we've recorded to date. It will happen too quickly for most people to retrain themselves, and we'll see a lot of folks without work opportunities.

The article discusses guaranteed income as a solution. I also hear this a lot, and I'm a huge fan of the idea, but it isn't possible for the United States to implement. I haven't seen an example where it is. If we take the _total_ fed gov revenue of 2015 and distribute it across the population, each person would be left with less than 10k/yr. I want it to work, but I just don't see how it can.

>but we really need to think about the _length_of_time_ these technology transitions of the past took

This is the critical difference between now and the previous technological revolutions. They are moving too fast now for people to keep up and the skills required are more challenging.

"if a robot can do a job more cheaply than a human, then whatever that robot produces is then cheaper for everyone else to buy!"

Why do I give a shit that some rich bastard can now buy a cheaper Kia when I'm on the street cause I can't pay rent?

"If most of the economy were efficiently automated, then you would barely need an income to survive or thrive."

Really? If most of the economy were automated, what are the rest of us going to do for income?

"It does suck if your job is automated out, but the overall good to society can't be denied."

Neither can the overall negatives to society. The utopian dream of everyone having time for their own pursuits is awesome, and I hope it happens. But, there is also the long period in between where people are still required to have jobs and income to survive, yet there are extremely few jobs available.

> If most of the economy were efficiently automated, then you would barely need an income to survive or thrive.

$prices = ($prices * 0.9)

$income = ($income * 0.0)

If most of the benefits from robots flow to the 0.1% who own them, and most of the costs of robots fall on the rest of the population who work for a living, they can be accounted for as a net good to society while being disastrous in practice.

$income goes to zero for that particular person at the time they lose their job, yes, but all of their prices for every good that gets automated goes down. If we repeatedly make everything cheaper, then a low income doesn't matter. Everyone is richer in the sense that a particular good is cheaper.

Also, I very highly doubt that income would reach zero. People wouldn't have to work 40 hours a week, sure, but would everyone just sit around with their thumbs up their butts not knowing how to provide value to others? I think the assertion that all income would go to the rich needs some evidence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8m8cQI4DgM

"$income goes to zero for that particular person at the time they lose their job, yes, but all of their prices for every good that gets automated goes down. "

And what good does that do the people who no longer have any income?

"If we repeatedly make everything cheaper, then a low income doesn't matter."

Where are these people getting any income?

"People wouldn't have to work 40 hours a week, sure, but would everyone just sit around with their thumbs up their butts not knowing how to provide value to others?"

Not everyone, but a majority of people, probably.

I was standing in line at the grocery store last week and overheard a father talking to his son about purchasing some item of candy from the display at the register.

Son (holding up candy): Dad can you get this for me?

Father: No.

Son: It's only a dollar. That's not a lot of money.

Father: Do you have four quarters?

Son: No

Father: A dollar is a lot when you don't have it.

The way we do economics depends pretty heavily on there being enough jobs for everyone, or nearly enough anyway. And our culture reinforces this fact (a strong desire to work is honorable, a belief that most work is mostly bullshit is not) which will make it harder for our society to agree to rethink our economics, even if what we're doing is clearly not working. And it doesn't help that our political system seems broken as well, in much of the West.

So yes, the overall good to society can be denied, if it turns out that we aren't smart enough to reap the benefits of our technology, and instead get to watch our economy collapse and our society eat itself, right before the owners of the robots decide to murder the rest of us since we were complaining too much.

> The way we do economics depends pretty heavily on there being enough jobs for everyone...

That's the way many economists interpret the economy, but modern macroeconomics economics can hardly be called an accurate and reliable representation of the real world.

> And our culture reinforces this fact (a strong desire to work is honorable ...

Then culture will have to change.

Yes, culture will have to change. But the technological advances are coming an awful lot faster than cultures usually change, historically speaking. And even if we make it through to the other side, it's probably going to be painful.

You act as though the Puritan work ethic is just a thing we can evaluate the efficiency of, and keep or discard based on the results of that evaluation. I wish this were so, but my wishing doesn't make it so.

There are many subcultures. The Puritan ethic is probably quite small these days. A subculture can thrive alongside.

How about this scenario: A rich person builds a town where a new ethic holds sway, using her money to 'fend off' the rest of the world and executing a new model culture, based on automation, creativity and leisure. Folks learn to envy its benefits; the young decide to emulate it. Soon only old Puritans live outside the new plan, in ghettos where they pretend to work and exchange money in a dusty farce of the old economy.

> The way we do economics depends pretty heavily on there being enough jobs for everyone, or nearly enough anyway

The way the current capitalist economy is premised on a vey narrow exclusively capitalist class, and a very broad primarily working class from which the capitalist class extracts value. (While there are some redistributive mechanisms in place, they largely are downward transfers from the more successful members of the working class to the less successful members of that class -- or those that are effectively excluded from participation in either capital or labor because of lack of resources for the former and lack of marketable skills for the latter -- because capital income is tax favored over labor income.)

However, the more capital intensive the production of value is, the less well this basic structure works -- the less the marginal production increase of additional units of labor provides given existing capital, the less real income can be earned from labor. Unless you more equally distribute effective ownership of capital (either by direct redistribution of capital assets, or socialization of the gains of capital through tax and benefit policy, or some other means) the whole system falls apart.

> right before the owners of the robots decide to murder the rest of us since we were complaining too much.

That's also a means of leveling the ownership of capital, if you think about it (but its only a short-term solution to the problems faced by the owners of robots if they don't still have a leveling mechanism working between them.)

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