> RELAX. MACHINES ALREADY TOOK OUR JOBS<p>I don't think the analogy holds at all, people used to be moved from intensive labor jobs (mines/fields) to less intensive and less physical jobs (factories, &c.) and earned workers rights, vacations, min wages &c. in the process. Now they're moved from low skill min wage jobs (factories, warehouses) to precarity and meaningless jobs, min wages aren't rising, retirement age is increasing, quality of life is stagnating [0] ...<p>Automation is fine as long as it brings something positive to the workers, today it doesn't bring anything to the workers. The only people benefiting from it are the people designing the tools and the companies replacing workers with these tools, I doubt this would represent more than 10% of the global population.<p>If we don't rethink our concept or "work and "jobs" we're going to have a real bad time, we can already see it today with growing inequalities and it's only going to accelerate.<p>Instead of talking about how a machine can harvest more potatoes than a farmer we should talk about how much social misery is created. It's more of a moral and social problem than a technical one.<p>[0] Don't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so their lives are better now than 50 years ago"
A friend and I debate this topic all the time<p>Is this time really different?<p>Pro:<p>1) Automation and Ai is replacing white collar work this time. There could truly be insufficient job creation as we see already with the gig economy<p>2) As Charles Murray wrote preciently in the 90s a great spoil of the wealth goes to people of higher intelligence. People in these walled gardens (literally sometimes) cannot relate to life on the outside. E.g. article today on front page about more Americans than working 2 jobs and the top comments there [A]. Also seen with the increasing wealth gap and increasing in wealth for the uber rich after covid and 08. There is no catching up especially with fed policies that reward existing asset owners<p>3) There may come a time where there is no marginal use for labour at a living wage<p>4) The ubi has already started and will now just accelerate. E.g. earth as portrayed in the expanse<p>Con:<p>5) Libertarian argument: this has all happened before. Human wants and needs are unlimited. Labour is a scarce and valuable resource. There will always be jobs maybe at lower nominal wages but higher real wages if govts stop controlling interest rates and let prices fall<p>I'm on the con side of the argument but I can't think of anything more compelling<p>Hope this article becomes popular as I look forward to expanding my horizons via the educated hacker News crowd<p>[A] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184012" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184012</a>
I have a theory that automation can be reframed as an imbalance between natural resources and labor. Economy at large is either constrained by available supply of labor or supply of natural resources. The automation causes the labor constraint to disappear, and economy is then only constrained by supply of natural resources.<p>So we can see effects of this imbalance elsewhere in the world, in some poor countries, where there is too much available labor and not enough natural resources (or accumulated capital that can extract those).<p>In such countries, additional jobs are created, but they are of the type that requires very little additional resource input, typically service jobs. This creates huge inequality, where large amounts of people are either left out or are lucky enough to cater for the small minority.<p>Similar with automation, I suspect that while it is true that "jobs" can be created as much as needed (there is always a place for another person to be some kind of special servant to the rich capital owners), the inequality in society is going to rise (unless people themselves rise and revolt against such system).
This is a tangent, but:<p><i>> The secretarial pool?</i><p>The secretarial pool is sorely missed. The few times in my work life when I had access to a secretary (either official or de-facto), it was a productivity multiplier and ensured a baseline quality in all communication.<p>The result of killing that sector is terrible marketing done in Word and boss emails like IVE NOT HERD FROM HIM MAYB ITS NOT GOOD.
Not jobs but <i>tasks</i>.<p>Chauffeurs used not only to drive but maintain the vehicles. Later cars became more reliable, the skill to drive them became more widespread and some tasks (e.g. signaling) mechanized, and the maintenance more specialized.<p>Automation did the same with calculation and I doubt anyone misses that.<p>“Job” is scary, “task” generally less so.
What I’ve noticed is that cost of housing, landscaping, and home repairs are getting incredibly expensive. Maybe they always were. But practically everything else is really cheap. You can get all your entertainment from library books and movies or cheap monthly subscriptions. Food and clothing are inexpensive if you aren’t looking for the best. Transportation is not expensive.<p>I think people will continue working 40 hours a week until they can afford a decent house. At least that’s what I would do. It’s practically my retirement plan, work until I can afford a house then find a low stress fulfilling job to work part time and explore my hobbies. Hopefully AI can solve this problem next.
This article is a very interesting example of capitalization on the Lump of labour fallacy.<p>Two examples made it very obvious:<p>1. there's only one diagram, and it looks catastrophic. the article is designed to give the reader the impression that there is a catastrophe going on, by hiding the counterpart (that is, jobs created in the meanwhile)<p>2. cleverly, what the article doesn't show, it describes, in ridiculous terms:<p>> from the point of view of, say, a 10th century farmer, over<p>> 90% of the jobs we do now are effectively made up–make-work<p>> stopgaps that simply prove, in the words of Mark Twain, that<p>> "civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary<p>> necessaries."<p>so, 90% of the jobs that didn't exist in the 10th century are essentially... vanity.
If machines were taking a disproportionate number of jobs a pretty easy way to mitigate this would be to lower retirement age. Older workers who can't retrain as easily could be phased out of the workforce with minimal inflationary impact.<p>If your reaction to lowering retirement age is to fret about rising life expectancy and "where is the money going to come from?" then congrats - you don't <i>really</i> believe jobs are being automated.<p>It's interesting that the media drives both mutually contradictory narratives at the same time.
The problem of how to clean a house with robots is completely unsolved. Mopping the floor properly and dusting small objects on shelves will remain an unsolved AI problem for a long time; in the meanwhile, more AI means more exploitation (see Uber, or Mechanical Turk, etc), with people getting their orders from robots.<p>So yeah, somehow Marx is still right, at some point or another that's the modicum of unshakable human work that makes everything works, i.e. gives it any meaning of value. What we're seeing is the good old replacement of "living work" by "dead work" (machinery), to compensate (so far successfully) for the <i>tendency of the rate of profit to fall</i>[1].<p>Before anyone says that "labour theory of value" has been proven false, please take a few seconds to read in the OP article, or most article on these matters, or the way any capitalist enterprise works: it may be false from some POV but absolutely everyone behaves like if it were true... Weird isn't it?<p>1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...</a>
Good. The most realistic future is one where the wealthy class replaces all the labour with machines, then all the poor people die, and the descendants of the rich can live under utopian Star Trek communism. 100 years from then it won’t matter if the wealth was spread equitably at the beginning or not.