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Comment by oliveira12345 | Hacker News Reader

"Yet rather than putting people out of work, this will supposedly free them up for more creative, skilled tasks, rather than subjecting them to menial, low-skilled work"

This is a lie.

It pretends that the factory owner will continue to pay the wages of existing employees and also the acquisition-and-maintenance of new CPS machines. Simply a lie.

It pretends that the employees will be free "for more creative skilled tasks"... this is almost insulting... Previous employees will be fired and in their place will be a small team of highly specialized technicians to control the machines. There is no hope for previous-employees to be kept, they will basically be replaced by machines - please don't create illusions.

The truth is that this means layoffs and a new wave of unemployment, for the benefit of the corporate efficiency though machines highly intelligent.

The blame should not fall on the technology itself, but instead on the politics which allow the technology to be used to boost financial results without taking into account the social-costs of it.

I believe this should be regulated to create socially-owned factories to solve nation-wide necessities.

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It is a lie and it is insulting to expect that it will slip past most people (it's a "some of the people all of the time" lie). I agree with everything except your last sentence. Some alternatives to socialism:

* basic income

* putting teeth back in overtime laws and shortening the workweek

* "Communes" that arise naturally as the rising cost of rent-seeking exceeds the falling inefficiency of small-scale production. Still capitalism, just with an inverted structure.

All three of these address the fundamental labor supply/demand imbalance without the need for socialism. That said, I tend to agree that the prospects of socialism are underestimated -- the internet almost certainly improved the viability of social economic systems by a factor of 10 or so -- but I am skeptical of the ability to impose one without tearing society apart first. Revolution sucks enough to make the other alternatives look attractive by comparison.

From another point of view, all three are forms of socialism; BI, particularly, is very easy to see as a form of the public as a whole owning the means of production in society and receiving rents from them, and the naturally-arising communes are the doubleton of bottom-up approaches to socialism.

For that matter, the whole modern mixed economy which has pretty much entirely replaced the 19th century system that socialist critics named "capitalism" is nothing but the result of progressive introduction of socialist elements into the preexisting capitalist system. A big socialist evolution -- punctuated, to be sure, and not without upheaval at some points -- in most developed countries rather than a socialist revolution. I should not be surprised to see it continue.

> Some alternatives to socialism: > basic income

You may want to check the definition of "socialism" that you're using, as basic income (along with group healthcare) is one of the canonical examples of socialism. Which is a good thing, as long as we remember to regulate it properly (just like how we need to regulate capital-focused ideas - any pure ideology will eventually cause problems if left unchecked)

I wanted to engage with this but I'm having a hard time getting past:

the internet almost certainly improved the viability of social economic systems by a factor of 10 or so

Certainly for me, arbitrary, dimensionless quantification of an essentially unmeasurable factor casts the rest of your post in a bad light.

Still, basic income isn't entirely good: it denies people the ability to meet a basic need - that of being valued for their contribution to society or some other enterprise. In other words, it replaces the good feeling of doing honest work with a kind of glorified unemployment benefit. While it would be good culturally (by allowing those of an artistic bent to pursue their craft, for example), it's not going to do much for the mental well-being of most of those laid-off factory workers.

As far as your point on communes, can you elaborate on how rent seeking is going to get comparatively more costly? What particular types of rents were you referring to?

> In other words, it replaces the good feeling of doing honest work with a kind of glorified unemployment benefit. While it would be good culturally (by allowing those of an artistic bent to pursue their craft, for example), it's not going to do much for the mental well-being of most of those laid-off factory workers.

We need to move away from the meme that your 'honest work' determines your worth. It was very instrumental in the past, so it's not a surprise we've integrated it culturally, but it makes no sense in a post-scarcity world. Humans do have a need to do something worthwhile, but it doesn't necessarily have to be put inside the current "slave away your life for the right to live" framework of jobs.

Come to think of it, how much of that "good feeling of doing honest work" do people have today, when more and more are employed doing bullshit jobs that are artifacts of various zero-sum games existing in our economic system?

This is a great point but it's not orthogonal to mine. Basic income doesn't provide a framework for self worth; it simply replaces a need to toil for money with a state-provided guarantee of a reasonable standard of living. If you have some side project or external, monetarily low-valued way of spending your time (full-time parenthood, art, a cottage business) then you've solved the worth problem on your own. If you're a displaced factory worker, you now have a new (admittedly nicer) problem.

To your coda, I think a lot of contemporary angst comes from precisely that - a sense that jobs really are basically worthless. Most of us behind a desk have felt that at some point. Even my frontline public servant friends in the military, healthcare, and police report similar feelings from time to time.

There's nothing about basic income that prevents working. In general, having more money gives people better options. For example, it can make it more practical to go back to school, or to take a rewarding but low-paying job such as teaching.

On the margin, there may be people who choose not to work. For example, they may decide that staying home to raise the kids is a better choice than a job that's barely worth it. Businesses might need to pay people somewhat more or treat their employees somewhat better to fill positions. I don't see how this is a bad thing.

> Still, basic income isn't entirely good: it denies people the ability to meet a basic need - that of being valued for their contribution to society or some other enterprise.

No, it doesn't. Basic income does not prohibit people from working and being paid for their work; in fact, one of the arguments for BI is that it among the things it can replace is the minimum wage, allowing work that has positive value but which is not viable in an environment with a minimum wage to be done. Including, e.g., jobs that have a low short-term net value to the employer because they have a high investment in training, but which also prepare people for the higher-paying jobs which are available in society.

> In other words, it replaces the good feeling of doing honest work with a kind of glorified unemployment benefit.

BI is not anything like an unemployment benefit. Particularly, because you don't have to be unemployed to get it, and because it doesn't have the behavioral testing associated with unemployment insurance.

That feels like an artificial distinction. Probably I misunderstand BI, but doesn't it play out like this:

No BI scenario: Company pays 50 groats a year to a worker to create TPS reports based on its sense of the value of having those reports completed. 100 groats annually, maybe.

BI scenario: State pays everyone 10 groats a year. Company now pays 40 groats to its TPS writers (or maybe 35, plus 5 groats extra in tax to help pay for BI.)

The net for the worker is, optimistically, the same. Therefore, it's basically a livable cushion for those who don't have jobs. Basically, unemployment protection without the conditions.

I can see significant benefits for small nonprofit organizations who might not be able to pay staff to do necessary things; in these cases, BI covers payroll and people can work on altruistic activities and find their self worth that way. BI creates a level playing field, so now those nonprofits can choose the most passionate or skilled people for any given position. The flip side of that is that you now have full funding for all the agitators and malcontents who want to create all kinds of nasty pressure groups, something ordinarily limited by most people's need to put food on the table.

> No BI scenario: Company pays 50 groats a year to a worker to create TPS reports based on its sense of the value of having those reports completed.

[...]

> BI scenario: State pays everyone 10 groats a year. Company now pays 40 groats to its TPS writers

How does that conclusion work?

We've already established that in the absence of the BI, the intersection of the supply and demand curves for companies to hire people to write TPS reports is at 50 groats a year. Howe does giving everyone 10 groats per year of income independent of groat writing decrease the market clearing cost of groat writing? Considering the supply (labor) supply alone, it shouldn't decrease the marginal utility cost of groat writing, but given that, like most things, income has a declining marginal utility, the baseline income should increase the financial equivalent to that cost, and thus shift the demand curve in a way that would increase the market clearing cost. Where's the countervailing supply side effect that more than makes up for this? I suppose its possible depending on tax rates and how they are distributed that the marginal value to the company of TPS reports could be decreased, resulting in a shift in the demand curve that has the effect of reducing the market clearing price, but that's not obviously correct.

In any case, at the same time, work that has a marginal value to the employer less than the pre-BI minimum wage becomes a viable form of employment with BI if the minimum wage is removed. (The BI provides the minimum condition guarantee, removing the need for a minimum wage to provide an assurance that at least those employed have a minimum condition guarantee.)

My conclusion is simply that the going rate (market clearing price) for TPS writers is 50 groats a year, meaning that our TPS clerk can expect 50GPY for his labor. Since the employee gets 10GPY from the state, the company now only needs to pay him 40GPY to ensure he's equally well compensated. The money for BI has to come from somewhere, so I don't think it's a plausible conclusion that salaries would stay the same while everyone gets a chunk of extra money from the state. Further support comes from the rationality of employers who would prefer to ensure employees were equally paid in total in both a no-BI and BI scenario.

I think your point is that declining marginal utility of income in a BI scenario means that companies have to pay proportionately more to make up for the decline in utility caused by everyone having more income. I don't have what I assume is your background in economics to argue that point with theory, but it fails a basic plausibility test for me: your claim is that it's more likely that employers will pay more in direct salaries to workers who are receiving money from the state than it is that they will pay less. It doesn't hold up in today's world either: compare salaries in Scandinavian countries, where the state provides huge benefits to citizens against the USA where there is essentially no support from government.

Please elaborate on what you mean by "communes." Sounds good to me.

There is a commune (Arcosanti) about an hour south of where I live: low environmental footprint. I would like to see more places like Arcosanti be created that are tailored to different industries: writing/editing/content creation, software development, educational centers, etc. A common theme would be a low environmental footprint with a community farm. It makes sense to cluster people working in similar industries together.

edit: people would work in/at these communes, when possible, to avoid cost and energy use of commuting to work.

One interesting aspect of basic income is that it would create a large number of people who are now free to become politically active. People can sit in the streets with no end in sight en masse. Sounds like a revolution in the making.

How about Less People. Most of the worlds problems would be reduced with fewer people. This is only a partial solution if you think about it.

> How about Less People. Most of the worlds problems would be reduced with fewer people.

Less people is not a policy, its a policy outcome.

(IIRC, the evidence suggest that the best policy to get fewer people and reduce natural rate of population increase is stronger social safety nets that reduce people's reliance on family -- usually children -- for security against financial misfortune. So, actually, the things discussed upthread like BI might reasonably be seen as likely to contribute to "less people".)

Ok. You first.

Go on...

You see now why this is not a viable solution. At least, it isn't until planetary emigration becomes possible.

No, birth control is an option. Make it available to anyone who asks for it (permanent kinds included). China has a rather more authoritarian approach. I prefer voluntary methods (without incentives). It isn't a complete solution because: 1) there will always be variation in skills among people even if the population is reduced. 2) With few enough people (extreme case) mass production of goods is not necessary. 3) I think there's an old argument that with robots providing everything, eventually there is no incentive for people to even become smart enough to maintain them and the system falls into disrepair. I'm not sure when or what equilibrium might be reached. I am sure that less people would help the problem and does not require planetary emigration. It is a viable partial solution. It is not a complete solution.

You're thinking wrong. You're thinking that people can only be employed to do stuff of a certain level. That's false.

Instead, you should think in terms of a society spending people. Take farming, for instance. We had about 35% of our people working on farms. Then mechanization came to agriculture, and now we have maybe 2% of our people working on farms. What will all the poor farmhands do? Starve? Well, it turns out that farmhands could do a lot more than just farm. But the mechanization of agriculture freed us from wasting an unnecessary 33% of our workers on farms. They went on to do a lot of useful stuff, from which society as a whole benefited.

Don't waste your workers in jobs that aren't necessary. It holds your society back.

Now, the problem comes when you expect that people "deserve" or "need" a job in a factory. That's false, too. They need/deserve a decent job. They may need training to get there. But if you think they need a factory job because they can never be competent to do anything more, I think you are selling people short...

Thanks for your explanation - there is a brighter future through your ideas.

What measures could/should be taken to minimize the social impact of this?

Would something along the lines of making special regulation so that the factory, in the verge of firing the workers, should pay a special compensation to contribute to the formation of those workers? A special tax on mecha-factory-robots ?

I think that responsible companies (there are a few) should do this, but probably it's going to take government. It could be done as part of the unemployment insurance, for example. It could also be done as part of the educational system.

But that requires competent government, so here's where I turn into a pessimist. What's actually likely to happen is that we lay off people and just drop them, and they become unemployable, not because of lack of talent, but because of lack of training.

It's hardly an accident that one of the most successful capitalist systems in the history of the world has, since the automation of agriculture, shifted to storing millions of people (read: excess labor) in a vast, growing prison system.

I am starting enjoy imagining what would happen. Without much thinking people worry first about people losing their mundane jobs to machines, and the machine owners making bigger profits. The variables to consider run much wider than that, for example this will allow manufacturers to make the cost of their goods much lower, and undercutting that of other manufacturers. Socially owned factories will have limited value if the margins keep shrinking. Automation can also bring the cost of entry to the manufacturing market down, or reduce the need to create entire assembly lines, so more people could enter this market independently. The manufactured goods will also need buyers, there's no end game where someone replaces all the workers with machines and then try to sell the output to... machines? Buyers and sellers will still need to find each other, people will also still like to interact with other people. People will still experiment with new ways to use the machines, or improve on the machines.

> The manufactured goods will also need buyers, there's no end game where someone replaces all the workers with machines and then try to sell the output to... machines?

If I were an evil factory owner, then I would replace my workers with machines and sell the produce of my factory to those providing the raw materials and to those owning other factories that produced goods that I wanted. It wouldn't be a matter of selling to the machines, it would be a matter of creating a closed market from which the means of production; including the copyrights and design of the machines, the expertise to operate them, and the raw materials necessary to create and operate them; never exited. In effect, everyone who did not own a machine, or was not part of a creative industry that produced art that matched my aesthetics, would simply become excess to requirements.

A closed market system that will likely get smaller in time, or even eventually devoid of humans altogether. It's not hard to imagine that at some point the feedback loop will close over the automated economy and it will be able to function on its own, without any input from humans.

Indeed, one seemingly plausible outcome is that the 1% starts complaining about the .1% . That the trend is uncapped given sufficient production multiplication ability... until one person ends up with a robot army and ownership over everything.

We won't get there overnight, but how far we might get towards that extreme is worrying.

The truth is that this means layoffs and a new wave of unemployment, for the benefit of the corporate efficiency though machines highly intelligent.

Disagree slightly. I don't think it would look like "We are bringing in the TRX-1000 to do your job." Rather it will be along the lines of "Corpocom is going out of business because they can't compete in quality or price compared to Mechacom."

Small but key distinction in my mind.

The other key distinction being the number of extra direct and indirect jobs Corpocom creates to sell its product, because its margins on manufacture are so much bigger than Mechacom's it can justify whopping commissions and a really aggressive marketing play...

Sucks to be a production control manager for Mechacom, but life looks a lot rosier if you've a flair for persuading people that they won't get fired for buying Corpocom instead.

Plus the majority of Corpocom's products end up being sold to people who didn't think they needed or wanted Mechacom's anyway. And even if Mechacom doesn't survive, there are jobs in production innovation at Nucom figuring out how the machines will talk to each other when manufacturing a device people thought had no reason to exist two years ago.

We've been a supposedly decade away from eliminating much of our labour requirement for at least a century, but what's actually happened is that most people have more stuff and different job titles these days.

> This is a lie.

It's a prediction about the future. The fact that you have a contradictory prediction about the future (layoffs and a new wave of unemployment) doesn't mean that people who put forth the opposing view are lying. Unless you have a functioning crystal ball, only time will tell which view is correct.

There have been plenty of examples of such innovations over the past century or more (dating back at least to the cotton gin) which have obviated certain manual labor and arguably have ultimately (directly or indirectly) freed up workers for more creative/skilled tasks. But somehow you're able to confidently assert that such a prediction in this case is a lie?

I did not intended to address the people with opposing views - I meant to addressed the arguments and tried to do so. I believe in respecting all opinions, the article is very interesting and the discussion spinning around it is a sign of its relevance.

There are contradictions in the prediction (even if it becomes true or not in the future)

* Why would a factory, built upon a big number of low-skilled workers, would need a big number of creative-skilled workers ?? Why would the factory pay the extensive formation necessary to transform "low-skilled" into "high-skilled" workers ?? Would they all become proeficient new professionals, or possess the necessary educative background and personal vocation to become skilled workers in a different career path ?? What would they do in their new role ??

It seems a contradiction, and contains the illusion that there will be better jobs for all the workers, when there is a serious and (most) probable risk of ending up with the opposite effect: a new wave of unemployment.

With that clear, I do hope your prediction becomes true and all jobs do become better. I just have a have a hard time imagining the world going down that path.

    > There have been plenty of examples of such innovations over the past century

Could you share some info about them? Would help understand your point of view

>I believe this should be regulated to create socially-owned factories to solve nation-wide necessities.

Wow dude, I've got to say that's a poor take on things. We're just beginning to see the benefits of factories like this (I can design any chip board I want online, then have it sent to me in the mail). Factories have traditionally been single purpose, but that won't last. Soon factories will be designed to be more like platforms. I design something, then I sell it, then the factory builds it, then UPS ships it. With the best factory platforms I'll be able to run an international hardware business from anywhere in the world. It's gonna be freaking sweet (mostly because I'll buy a house for what I would pay 1 years rent in SF)!

The best way I've found to explain the lie is this: The business owner is not stupid. He knows that TCO (total cost of ownership) of automated production systems is cheaper than manual labor. This means that the total cost of paying for design, installation, operation, and maintenance is lower than manual production labor. Got that? It costs less to pay the "high skilled" workers than the lower skilled ones - because it takes so many fewer of them.

Yes, it is a lie even if you could retrain all the displaced low-skill workers to be high-skilled, there wouldn't be enough jobs for them after the transition.

The first industrial revolution was entirely about replacing high-skilled manual laborers with relatively low-skilled factory workers. There's no inherent economic law requiring such a shift to be a net drain on employment - sometimes 100 people manning power looms can do something cheaper than 90 skilled weavers.

Sometimes not, though: the clothes end up just being cheaper as a result and net employment in the clothing industry drops, but if there's anything resembling competition in the market there'll be a drop in prices, and now everyone who was buying clothes will create a bit more aggregate demand for other things. That's the "work in other sectors of the economy" part that occasionally gets mentioned as a solution, and is in large part why we're at 95% employment despite 4 centuries of "job-killing" innovation.

>> There's no inherent economic law requiring such a shift to be a net drain on employment -

Yes, there is. I just presented it with the TCO thing. What has been happening so far is that the displaced workers were offered jobs somewhere else because there was another need they could fill. The net drain does happen. It happens within the set of people working at a company, and the industry. Only if there is unmet demand in the overall economy does it not affect unemployment by having people do something else entirely - and I don't mean maintaining the machines, I already showed that to require fewer people.

>> sometimes 100 people manning power looms can do something cheaper than 90 skilled weavers.

The human labor per item still went down. You just threw a capacity expansion on top of the efficiency increase. That just means a competitor will be out of business soon meaning fewer people employed, not more.

See this parking lot: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.441312,-83.043004,80m/data=!...

It's full of product (all same model). Decades ago, prior to automation it was full of employee vehicles, and so was the overflow lot across the street to the west. The neighborhoods around there were thriving and now are quire run down.

We've been lucky in finding new things for people to do outside of industries where this happens. People can only consume so much in a day though, and as the labor hours required to fill human-need-hours goes down there will be a problem.

It's not necessarily the case that cost-lowering innovations will drive demand for labor down, even without increases in capacity. Usability innovations are often of this variety.

If I can hire two people who work half as fast but at 1/4 the price each because they require no special skills, I can profitably produce the same goods with half the input costs and a net doubling of the employment I create.

Such innovations certainly exist, and there are even some reasons to expect they'll be more common in the future: an uneven distribution of income means more places to find cheaper labor.

It's actually pretty tough to fire people and bring them in at big corporations. I've made some good money training server developers into mobile developers and whatnot simply because these large companies actually do find it more cost effective to retrain current employees than fire and rehire. It's true there are cases where that won't happen, but it is also true retraining and retention happens quite a lot.

First, as a prediction, it cannot be a 'lie'. Second, it's a prediction that actually makes sense. If menial jobs are reduced - the only way to earn money will be to perform less trivial tasks, or, to put it another way, 'more creative, skilled tasks'. It's either that or we're all going down the drain. Which option do you think is more likely?

Explained in comment above: the prediction contains contradictions.

It may not be an option for everyone to make a "more creative skilled task" as it usually implies an extensive education including university and nowadays even a master (or more)... So even when people are willing to take another higher-skilled-career, that may not be an option for example for 40+ with kids... (no time to do it)

> Which option do you think is more likely?

We can look at poorer countries and see that necessity forces people to survive by whatever means exist. When they can they work. When there is no work, people have to resort to illegal means of survival, leading to eventual political instability and well, sometimes war... nothing good.

I agree with your points. Yes, the current generation of displaced workers will be in trouble and yes if the changes are quick the result won't be pretty (re: illegal means of survival). Despite this history also shows that the long run is likely to go the way I proposed(?). I guess the real difference is that my approach is too macro.

Edit: Also, what about the opposite force? You can't displace workers and expect them to still consume as they did before. So regardless of how good technology gets I find it hard to reason that it should displace people at apocalyptic rate. If you put these workers in too tough of a position too quickly, they won't buy the very products they used to make. So entire industries themselves are restrained - otherwise everyone loses, including the industries that would supposedly gain. Sorry if I worded this poorly.

Was that not the same story preached in the 1900's though? What will make this different?

UPDATE: Let me clarify that with "socially-owned factories to solve nation-wide necessities" I meant to say "some way to use this technology towards the common good" - I tried to express this idea with a contrived example "socially-owned factories". Sorry for the misunderstanding

>I believe this should be regulated to create socially-owned factories to solve nation-wide necessities.

Which industries comprise the list of necessities?

Can't give you a complete answer on this, although I believe the correct way to evolve on this list (and other questions of importance to society) could be something like (for example):

* a) open period of public discussion (media info and debates), and invite proposals to be sent and received before a fixed deadline-A. This expects the contribution from anyone, both {government, social, private} entities which work around the context but also from anyone else who has a valid opinion or contribution to make (journalists, individuals, teachers, etc).

* b) let the discussion of arguments and solutions breed during the period of public discussion, and when deadline-A is reached identify key-arguments-and-participants who surfaced as dominant contributions and with them constitute a "task-team". (make available to them some gov-special-temp-permission to work on this)

* c) Ask the "task-team" to try to elaborate a joint proposal, with their different contributions taken into account, and explaining the pros/cons of the decisions proposed (this could serve also as an historical-explanation-of-why-those-decisions-were-proposed-at-that-time). If it is not possible to make a joint proposal (arguments too different) then the task-team would elaborate multiple proposals and take them to an online voting to let the public decide which proposals should be discarded at this point.

* d) At this point, there should already be public conscience of the problem and the different tradeoffs around proposed solutions (from a)). Also there should be a proposal elaborated by the "task-force" (from c)), so in this phase the proposal should be gradually implemented, with much communication and transparency of the whys-and-hows.

These are just some sparse ideas... I believe that society could be led to participate much further and generate greater/better contributions towards the well-being of the nation...

Yeah they're definitely capitalist propaganda and buckloads of utopian fantasies

I can't find any place where the article claims the work will be for the same employer. It only claims people will not be out of work, so your whole objection is a total straw man as you attack something the article doesn't claim.

If you want to actually attack the position in the article, attack the proposition that there will be as much work available in all total work places in the future. This is definitely a position that is possible to attack, but instead you assumed people have to be employed at the same places as now. Such an attack would have to start with explaining why this time is different from earlier shifts of technology that has not had this effect (in the long term. Some have caused short term unemployment spikes).

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