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Comment by Einstalbert | Hacker News Reader

I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over the static of a machine.

When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind, and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation, for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those, and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.

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A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s

But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scale. You can fit far more lifestyle apps on your phone than chairs around your table, and a couple of decades back few people would have foreseen mobile phone apps as a category of product that needed people to make, still less an industry reportedly topping up the paycheques of a million Europeans.

I'm not seeing the developed world's desire for more stuff reach satiation point, and if anything desire to subsidise unemployment is trending in the opposite direction.

In the USA, male participating in the wage economy has been in the decline since the 1940s:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11300001

For women, the peak was in 2000:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USALFPWNA

Wages for men have been in decline since 1973, which demonstrates one of the obvious ways people deal with declining opportunities: lower wages.

In the 1800s Western nations conquered the world, and were thus able to export their unemployment to other countries, thus creating what we now call The Third World. As late as 1820, India was still producing more steel than Europe, but all such industries were eventually closed in India and moved to Europe, leaving India in a bad situation from which it is yet to fully recover.

It's unlikely that Western nations will have an easy time exporting their unemployment in the 2020s or 2030s. Among other things, they lack the military power that is necessary to do so.

The labour force participation rates look rather different if you adjust them for the changing age profiles of the population, to account for there being a lot more old people and a lot more scope for them to afford to retire.

If you look at this example, it'll show overall labour force participation actually rose between 1960 and 2000 for employees of every age under 60 http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/09/art3full.pdf Admittedly that trend is unlikely to have continued through the last recession, but it's pretty hard evidence against the doom-mongers of the 1960s at least. And it's remained resilient against a number of trends other than automation, not least a marked tendency to export jobs rather than unemployment to the developing world.

Manchester cotton might not have been welcomed by India's textile manufacturers, but I'm baffled by the suggestion that the British decimated the Indian steel industry (I mean, quite apart from everything I've ever read on the subject suggesting Indian steel production vastly increased in the 19th century - railways being more steel-intensive than ceremonial sword production - an Indian family conglomerate now owns the British steel industry!)

Exported unemployment? Created the third world? The world wasn't kumbaya before colonialism.

On the other hand, I strongly suspect that we've long hit the point where we could apply our productivity to reducing working hours with little appreciable end effect in output of stuff (and a huge increase in quality of life).

"But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff."

Mere coincidence combined with survivorship bias. Ask the Easter Islanders or Mayans about how people always find new employment. By definition a developed economy is a country that was historically lucky, therefore its members hold very strange beliefs about cause and effect, like the collapse of employment in one industry magically results in employment in another industry because if it hadn't coincidentally happened, our ancestors economy would have collapsed and we'd be dead or owned by some other economy.

Bad car analogy is I've crossed many a street on foot, and I've never been hit, therefore there is a magic dead hand of social science that pushes cars out of my way, and I'll never get hit and nobody ever gets hit and its going to be eternally safe into the future. After all, if someone had run over my g-g-g-g-grandfather with an ox cart in the street, I wouldn't be here, therefore fatal car-pedestrian accidents don't happen.

Hell, modern theory has it that the pyramids were in essence a type of stimulus program to keep folks busy and fed (and no, they were not in fact slaves)!

I would love to see a return to investing in and updating some of the physical infrastructure that has degraded over time.

In the USA there are a huge amounts of bridges that need updating/repairing, dams needing repair (or removal), roads needing repair, dilapidated school buildings needing updating (as well as energy efficiency updates), etc. There seems like TONS of work to be done to refresh our aging physical infrastructure.

Not just the US. And not just maintenance. Creating good infrastructure is one of the best of all possible investments.

The problem isn't that there's no useful work; it's that the genius of the current economic system - the one where it's every individual for themselves, and there's no such thing as society - is incredibly bad at deciding what needs to be done to make the future better for everyone.

So education at all levels is mediocre, infrastructure is deliberately crippled for profit, there's no systematic planning for the future at all - and people in work are still spending huge amounts of time on essentially pointless activities.

It's an organisational and political problem, not a technological one.

Actually it's more of a psychological problem. Getting humans to learn deferred gratification as a species turns out to be exceptionally hard.

This is amusing to me, since a good number of people believe it was definitely slaves, and 'definitely' the Jewish slaves mentioned in the bible.

I would have been overjoyed to learn that the pyramids were a stimulus program when I was a child.

People theorize that all of life is busy work. No one should care that they thus theorize.

Comparative advantage.

Unfortunately, work esp in these current adverse conditions prepares people and teaches them invaluable survival skills that a vision of world without work could produce as an unintended consequence good-for-nothing slobs like in "Idiocracy" where they can't find their butt with both hands.

We need to teach people survival skills without working them to death.

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