[HN Gopher] Machines Already Took Our Jobs
___________________________________________________________________
Machines Already Took Our Jobs
Author : tmfi
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-02-17 11:33 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (computerhistory.org)
| wazoox wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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
| _tendency of the rate of profit to fall_ [1].
|
| 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?
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
| rakkhi wrote:
| A friend and I debate this topic all the time
|
| Is this time really different?
|
| Pro:
|
| 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
|
| 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
|
| 3) There may come a time where there is no marginal use for
| labour at a living wage
|
| 4) The ubi has already started and will now just accelerate. E.g.
| earth as portrayed in the expanse
|
| Con:
|
| 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
|
| I'm on the con side of the argument but I can't think of anything
| more compelling
|
| Hope this article becomes popular as I look forward to expanding
| my horizons via the educated hacker News crowd
|
| [A] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184012
| fbn79 wrote:
| "Automation and Ai is replacing white collar work this time." I
| think that If your daily work can be truly replaced by a
| graphic card running pattern matching software you should find
| a better way to invest your life.
| rakkhi wrote:
| Till they come for your job :)
|
| Ive seen a lot of jobs that have been automated that are not
| pattern matching even in IT security. Even where the job is
| not fully automated like firewall admin it is greatly reduced
| and the labour is not replaced. E.g 10 years ago at an Aussie
| bank we had 40 people performing firewall changes and 30
| security designers writing and reviewing the rules nedded.
| Algosec came along, we did software defined networking ,
| things moved to AWS and there are zero dedicated firewall
| admins anymore and all the designers were absorbed into the
| architecture and consulting teams and eventually returned to
| its original size of 20 i.e those 30 security design jobs
| disappeared
| watt wrote:
| Point is, you can't find not just a better way, but you can't
| find any way. You either own the CPU farm, or you're out.
| rakkhi wrote:
| Yeah this is the Charles Murray point. We can't all be AI
| repair or developers. A lot is capped by intelligence. A
| greater proportion of the gains go to those with the most
| intelligence and everyone on the bottom gets left behind.
| That is the real outcome of automation this time.
|
| You can see it in the shrinking middle class in the
| developed world. In the smaller proportion of productivity
| gains going to labour in the last 60 year ala Piketty
| ilaksh wrote:
| You are conflating things. The gains go to people who
| have privilege. For example, developers in less-wealthy
| countries can earn a fraction of what those in richer
| countries earn. Or those born to wealthy parents who
| don't really need to work and so go into business rather
| than engineering.
|
| Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means
| higher income is false.
|
| And the assumption many scientists and engineers make is
| that within a certain number of generations, maybe one,
| maybe ten, is that we will have AI much smarter than
| humans. That means smarter than you, and much better at
| your job than you (whether its "AI repair" or anything
| else). Smart guy.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence
| means higher income is false.
|
| No it isn't. This is only one study of dozens, possibly
| even hundreds, that have been conducted over the years:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01
| 602....
|
| The findings are always the same... the more IQ you have,
| the better off you end up doing, once you control for
| every other variable.
|
| But I get why no one on HN wants to hear that. IQ is
| something _you_ didn 't earn. It's not _yours_. It was
| _given_ to you, and not only was it given to you, you 're
| not allowed to refuse it either. You either have it or
| you don't. And what's worse, even if you _want_ to be
| smarter, that 's almost nothing you can do that'll raise
| IQ by a few points - _at best_. Someone with a 100 IQ
| will never be able to study enough or learn enough to
| match someone with a 160 IQ.
|
| Its a _lifelong_ , _glaring_ , _undeniable_ reminder that
| _the Universe is not fucking fair and does not fucking
| care about anyone_. And I 've known enough people that
| are the demographic of HN to know that, not only does
| this intrinsically eat at their core because you can't
| deny it or evade it, but it also shatters their utopian
| ideals - that if we just eliminate all <insert social
| justice term of the zeitgeist here> that we can lift
| everyone up.
|
| Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and
| there's literally nothing you can do about it right now.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and
| there's literally nothing you can do about it right now.
|
| The only reason we can't is because people like you think
| we can't and take the status quo as a god given immutable
| system which is inherently "right". There are plenty of
| things to be done to reduce, instead of increase,
| inequalities
| cbozeman wrote:
| You can't do anything about it because we don't
| genetically enhance children. Yet. As of two years ago,
| we mapped out about 2000 genes that contribute to
| intelligence. A decade ago, we knew of 100. Another
| decade or two from now, we'll have it entirely mapped out
| and we'll start to engineer our kids.
|
| The reason we'll do this is because our enemies will do
| this and a high IQ population is a strategic advantage.
|
| Its not about "systems" or the status quo. The status quo
| changes over time, always. Used to be, your ability to
| throw a spear and kill an animal for the tribe set you
| apart. Then, what vagina you came out of and what sperm
| were used to create you designated your station in life.
| Then, it became your ability to facilitate trade between
| parties. Later, it shifted to your ability to leverage
| the output of your fellow man to build a factory or a
| railroad. Now, in the Information Age, you're limited
| solely by your IQ, your creativity, and your grit. Those
| who advanced in the systems above all had grit,
| determination, willpower, drive. That's a necessary
| condition and likely always will be, but the other
| conditions all changed.
|
| IQ will likely be the stopping point, at least for
| humanity. What happens beyond us, that's anyone's guess.
|
| Unfortunately, you're still falling back into "utopia-
| vision". You think if we just build the right "system",
| we can eliminate all this. Not for a very long time.
| Probably not ever, and if we ever do, we won't be humans
| in the current sense, because whereas you're concerned
| with systems, I'm concerned with human nature, and as it
| we exist right now, human nature won't support _any_
| system where billions of people are propped up by
| millions for their survival. The resentment it generates,
| on both sides, is simply unsustainable. The "smart"
| people who generate all the wealth that the rest of
| society survives on will resent having to work to
| maintain society, and the rest of society that receives
| that wealth will resent not having the same quality of
| life as the "smart" people who make it all possible in
| the first place, usually not realizing they'd all be
| starving to death if the "smart" people decided to merely
| shut off access.
|
| And we won't end up a society of all philosophers and
| artists because frankly you have to be smart to be a
| decent philosopher and you have to be creative to be an
| artist. Most people have middling qualities of both
| traits. Furthermore, due to the interconnectedness of our
| global society, people are interested in, can access, and
| generally are only interested in the "best". Andrew Yang
| said it best during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle
| in regards to trying to "regulate" and "break up" Big
| Tech. No one's interested in using the _second-best_ tech
| product. Don 't believe that? Android and iOS are
| essentially at parity. You could also say Samsung and
| Apple are at parity. Almost no one uses Windows Phone OS
| even though its perfectly acceptable as an operating
| system and was more than capable of doing what almost
| every single person needs. But it was the second-best
| choice, with Android / iOS being the best.
|
| We see how that played out.
|
| I'm afraid we're in a really rough, really shitty ride. I
| _want_ to be wrong, because if I 'm wrong it means a
| better world, but I'm using the history of human nature
| as my reference.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Unfortunately, you're still falling back into "utopia-
| vision". You think if we just build the right "system",
| we can eliminate all this.
|
| Aiming for an utopia seems better than building a
| dystopia. I also never said "eliminate" but "reduce". You
| seem very focused on IQ as if it was the only metric to
| measure human lives potential. My grandparents aren't
| geniuses, neither I am, but they seemed to have had least
| a more positive life to aim for when they grew up and
| built a family
|
| I think we're both converging toward the same point but
| you view the system as a necessary evil that has to
| create inequalities due to things out of our reach like
| IQ and that we neither can nor should do anything about
| it. All I'm saying is that we could use a bit of that IQ
| to steer the system towards a society that doesn't
| systematically shits on the lower 70% of the population.
| Of course I'm also very pessimistic about the
| achievability of this, but I believe this is something we
| should strive for instead of just shrugging it off, yes
| the world is unfair, it doesn't mean we should make it
| more so.
| cbozeman wrote:
| The system isn't a necessary evil, its merely too big to
| topple by outside forces. The insiders have no incentive
| to bring the system down because of the myriad benefits
| to which it provides them. For every one insider who
| legitimately wants to balance the system out, there's 95
| others that will pay lip service to this ideal, then do
| whatever they want, followed by four or so real jackasses
| who either believe the system is totally fair, or that
| the rest of society "deserves" it.
|
| Every year we get to see this in action at Davos. You
| have a bunch of billionaires all flying to hang out with
| each other on their private jets while wringing their
| hands over global warming / climate change. They're all
| smart enough to know that their private jets output
| enormous amounts of CO2 emissions relative to the amount
| of passengers being moved, but no one changes... no one
| changes because if you arrive on a commercial airliner,
| even if you were to fly Emirates on their most luxurious
| fare, you still "look poor" compared to your peers, who
| all arrived on Gulfstream G650s or whatever...
|
| Michael Crichton pointed this out almost 15 years ago in
| a speech entitled, "Who Will Do The Sacrificing For
| Global Warming?" and literally pointed out what I just
| said above, only with a different location.
|
| People follow leadership, not rhetoric. If people in
| power aren't willing to change, no one will. After all,
| why should I reduce my consumption if Al Gore won't? He's
| worried about global warming, yet still lives in an 8000
| sq. ft. mansion that consumes $1000 of power per month.
| Hate to quote a video game, but its so succinct, so
| powerful, I just feel compelled - _" Deeds. Not words."_
| - Sejuani, League of Legends
| rakejake wrote:
| This is very similar to the storyline and theme of Player
| Piano by Kurt Vonnegut,
| pessimizer wrote:
| Could you help me find where they controlled for family
| income in this particular study? The thing most
| correlated with IQ test score is your parents wealth (and
| childhood pleasure reading.) If you then say that IQ
| score is then correlated with income, it's just saying
| that rich parents have rich children, and laundering that
| fact through theories about the existence and detection
| of general intelligence.
|
| You'd want to look for radical changes in income from
| parents to children, and look for reflections of that in
| IQ scores.
| [deleted]
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Yes, there is an effect, but it's nowhere near as strong
| as you think:
|
| >"Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated
| with $202 to $616 more income per year," he says. For
| example, a person with a score of 130 (in the top 2%, in
| terms of IQ) might earn about $12,000 more per year than
| someone with an average IQ score of about 100.
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-
| people-...
|
| I'm sure IQ has some effect on inequality but I'd bet
| money it's logarithmic rather than exponential.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| The summary of the study you linked to points to the
| opposite of what you're saying:
|
| > Regression results suggest no statistically
| distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and
| wealth.
|
| > ... higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability
| of being in financial difficulty.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| It's a mix of intelligence and privilege. You only need
| to be _just smart enough_ to take full advantage of said
| privilege. IIRC nobel prize winners have a median IQ of
| 120. You don 't have to be _that_ smart to win a nobel
| prize, but damned if it doesn 't help to have parents to
| back you every step of the way through your education and
| training, and the sympathetic ear of a rich and connected
| network of peers and friends to help you secure grant
| money.
| murukesh_s wrote:
| out of what? what if you own a sustainable farm house with
| solar grid. you don't give a shit about anything else..
| rakkhi wrote:
| Except entertainment, human contact, travel, and anything
| else you can't produce on your own. Took me a while to
| realise a wage was selling my labour to buy stuff other
| people produce. The higher the wage the more leverage I
| get over other people's production.
|
| A similar view leads to banks with massive loans and low
| interest rates own more of our productive capacity than
| feudal lords did over serfs. In Australia tax 35%
| average, 10% VAT, capital gains and bankls take 30% of
| your after tax income as a mortgage...
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Except entertainment, human contact, travel, and
| anything else you can't produce on your own. Took me a
| while to realise a wage was selling my labour to buy
| stuff other people produce. The higher the wage the more
| leverage I get over other people's production.
|
| These are extremely new concepts (besides human contact,
| but that you can always have), people use to live
| differently for 99% of human history. Saying there is no
| other way than the current way is plain wrong and
| borderline dangerous. Just talk to your grandparents and
| you'll feel like they lived on another planet.
|
| Our current lifestyle of unchecked consumption,
| absorption entertainment 3+ hours a day, traveling to the
| other side of the country/world thanks to cheap airlines
| &c. are not the norm, they're an anomaly
|
| > The higher the wage the more leverage I get over other
| people's production.
|
| While not technically wrong, this is a choice you have to
| make for yourself. There is more to life than consuming
| other people's production, be careful not to get trapped
| in the rat race
| agumonkey wrote:
| I spent 3 months at a small court room last summer. 99% of
| what was ~done (or not done depending on how you see it)
| could fit on a laptop. The whole service, if in digital form
| would require near zero human intervention. These people are
| mostly trying to navigate bad software, bad bosses, bad
| archives and bad workflow. Oh and angry users of course. The
| computational needs are not even GPU worthy.
|
| I'm not advocating a digital future[1], but a humongous
| amount of tasks at the service layer are really nil.
|
| [1] humanly and sociologically I'd be much more happier
| keeping most of the system, people contributing to society
| together, but with better tools and better team spirit
| (achievable through a little cultural shift), I don't see
| value in replacing all tasks and letting people idle or live
| 100 years of leisure, I don't even think it's mentally sane.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Most people can't, and more and more people are thrown in
| these jobs. This is a direct consequence of automation... and
| this is why we're in for a bad time unless we rethink our
| concept or work
| rakkhi wrote:
| Thus the Expanse. The only palatable solution for
| government is print money (ie. tax everyone's purchasing
| power) and pay it in increased welfare. E.g 1400 cheques
| and more coming. As long as everyone prints there is no
| debasement of currencies.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If everyone prints, there is no _relative_ debasement
| across currencies.
|
| There's a massive debasement against hard/productive
| assets.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Well look, if all this is becoming The Expanse, I'd like
| to make my way to the Ring Gate to a new world sooner
| rather than later. I find the idea of exploring strange
| new worlds far more enticing than getting my 1400
| credits, or even worse, my EUR$ Eurodollars.
| hansor wrote:
| Programming, remote surgery, judging(law), farming. Hardly
| "bad investment" from society point of view!
|
| It is well known bias(supported by numerous studies) that 90%
| people with your "attitude" are certain that THEIR job is
| somehow special and immune to automatization.
| [deleted]
| cbozeman wrote:
| It's the same old shit, hansor... no one considers a
| problem to be "their" problem, right up until it becomes
| _their_ problem.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Computer was once a job title.
|
| People used to get paid to shine shoes and press clothes
| everyday.
|
| Banks used to employee hundreds of people to staff their
| operations.
|
| The DMV is a sprawling human operated date entry firm
| fronting for a database and camera.
|
| Paralegals and research assistants are being replaced by the
| dozens.
|
| Entire factory campuses that employed towns are now operated
| by mere dozens.
|
| Fields that took dozens to manage can now be handled by a few
| people and traveling farm hands.
|
| Hedge funds are out performed by indexes. Many are cooking
| their books.
|
| Self driving cars will happen and displace millions of jobs
| over what, a decade? Two or three max? I'll bet my current
| retirement that it happens within the century.
|
| Jobs like shelf stocking, burger flipping, and the like could
| be automated _today_ if the displaced employees wouldn 't
| lead a violent revolution.
|
| That's the political reality. How the fuck do you keep 200
| million working people happy without repressing them or
| inciting a revolution?
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >The DMV is a sprawling human operated date entry firm
| fronting for a database and camera
|
| This one really hit home. I went to the DMV a few months
| ago for the first time in over a decade to upgrade my
| drivers license to a Real ID (must be done in person,
| previous renewals were done by mail). The entire process
| was unchanged from when I first got my license almost 30
| years ago.
|
| Stand in one line to check in. Sit down. Wait for your name
| to be called to stand in a second line to have them
| manually keypunch the paper form you have to fill out into
| their computer system. Sit down. Wait for your name to be
| called to stand in a third line to get your picture taken.
| Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a
| fourth line to pay (slight change here in that they now
| accept credit cards, up until a few years ago it was cash
| or checks only). Sit down. Wait for your name to be called
| to stand in a fifth line to pick up your new license. Leave
| after several hours.
|
| This whole transaction could have been accomplished with
| kiosks, 1/10th the number of employees, and 1/4 the amount
| of floor space in 5 minutes or less.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| I think that it's okay to say this to yourself and look for a
| different type of work. Saying this to other people misses a
| couple of important points.
|
| - If you can reskill, you're very fortunate. Not everyone is
| in the same position.
|
| - It doesn't scale to large numbers. The demand in the market
| for people with skills that can't yet be automated isn't
| necessarily enough to absorb all the people who are losing
| their jobs to automation.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Some people have spent decades investing in skills and
| careers that become obviated in a matter of years by new
| technology.
|
| It's easy to see today which lines of work can be better done
| by computers than by humans-- _today._ What 's less obvious
| is which lines of work will be automated in two decades.
| Having your job description written out of the economy by
| software is a non-event when you're 26, rough when you're 36,
| and a disaster when you're 46.
| toyg wrote:
| _> a great spoil of the wealth goes to people of higher
| intelligence._
|
| I think you mistyped "people born into greater wealth and
| connections, whose outcomes can be amplified through better
| education".
| rakkhi wrote:
| No I typed higher intelligence :)
|
| Yes higher starting wealth helps but these days you can't get
| one of these higher paying jobs E.g most people here without
| higher intelligence. This is by far the majority benefiting
| from automation and speeding its adoption not those who
| inherited their wealth
| toyg wrote:
| The real winners of automation don't have jobs.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > This is by far the majority benefiting for automation and
| speeding its adoption not those who inherited their wealth
|
| Can you elaborate ?
| rakkhi wrote:
| I can't do a better job than the much maligned Charles
| Murray. To not be accused of being racist in this book he
| only looked at white Americans:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
| lm28469 wrote:
| Either I misunderstood you or I'm missing something
| because it seems to support the opposite of your point.
|
| The "majority" doesn't benefit from automation, they're
| thrown into more and more meaningless jobs at the bottom
| of the ladder while the people working on automation and
| the companies implementing automation are thriving.
| Wealth inequalities being at an all time high would agree
| with that
|
| > Meanwhile, real family income for families in the
| middle was flat. Just about all of the benefits of
| economic growth from 1970-2010 went to people in the
| upper half of the income distribution.
|
| https://alexandbooks.com/archive/coming-apart-by-charles-
| mur...
| nateoearth wrote:
| I believe what they mean to convey is "the majority of
| people benefiting from increasing automation are those
| with higher IQs."
| jimbokun wrote:
| Comes down to whether you think computers will surpass humans
| in intelligence across the board in the near future.
|
| You can make the libertarian argument, if you believe there
| will still be jobs for which humans are better suited than
| machines.
|
| But that breaks down, when the machines are better at
| everything.
| DC1350 wrote:
| 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.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Haha, that's a really unique take on the issue. Dripping with
| cynicism, yet also hopelessly optimistic at the same time.
|
| I think I agree that even in a worst-case scenario the long
| term outcomes of automation are still positive. Though it's
| probably still worth considering how best to avoid or mitigate
| any pain it might cause in the short term.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
| toyg wrote:
| This is a tangent, but:
|
| _> The secretarial pool?_
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| rakkhi wrote:
| Everyone wants the secretary. No one wants to be the secretary.
| Especially the men:) Basically the market and government
| eliminated it ie productivity the job creates is too low for
| the marginal wage except for top management. Sit down you pleb
| developer and type :)
| triceratops wrote:
| > No one wants to be the secretary
|
| I find it hard to believe all the underemployed baristas (of
| any gender) with art or literature degrees wouldn't jump at
| an office job with benefits.
|
| Companies don't want to pay for secretaries anymore.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| We just call them executive assistants now.
| cbozeman wrote:
| No one wants to be them either.
| rakkhi wrote:
| And pay them more and require they have higher education
| and have less of them and only give them to senior
| management. Other than that nothing has changed :)
| js8 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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).
|
| 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.
|
| 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).
| pydry wrote:
| This is depressing if true since countries that have a surplus
| of natural resources relative to labor are clusterfucks almost
| without exception. India is a growing democracy. Libya is just
| a mess. Norway is the only country I can think of that escaped
| this trap.
|
| It's a pretty terrifying notion that the countriesof the world
| are hurtling towards a Libya future.
| js8 wrote:
| If you have actual abundance of natural resources, they are
| just not being extracted, you can get out of the trap
| temporarily by putting people to work on creating/maintaining
| the capital required for the extraction. The supply of labor
| is then the constraint for economic growth. This is what many
| communist countries (USSR, China) actually did during their
| own development. But eventually this capital accumulation
| will end and you will face the resource constraint, which is
| actually (somewhat counterintuitively) worse for the labor.
| People should want the economy to be constrained by labor
| supply.
| pydry wrote:
| All things are possible if you have honest and effective
| governance.
|
| The problem is that the honest and effective governance
| breaks down because warring factions are usually fighting
| over resource control.
| rakejake wrote:
| India is a resource poor and labour rich country unlike Libya
| and Norway.
| pydry wrote:
| & by comparison to Libya it's doing ok.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| At some point we'll have to get out of this mental framework.
| Is the only mission of humanity on this earth to consume as
| much and as many natural ressources to produce more for "the
| economy" ?
|
| What's the end goal ? Automate everything and consume
| everything as quickly as we can ? What do we do when we're done
| ?
| js8 wrote:
| Yeah, I agree, when I write "economy" I mean "capitalist
| economy". However, I think it is a really difficult to
| accomplish, people are almost always trying to up one
| another, and that drives this process.
| hoseja wrote:
| The only mission is to produce enough so that the guy next
| door can't come and take it. The guy next door of course does
| the same. The end goal lies in infinity because the Red
| Queen's race can't be stopped. If you stop you will be
| overtaken and destroyed. This is all followed by the heat
| death.
| dfilppi wrote:
| I'm still bitter about the wheel.
| gumby wrote:
| Not jobs but _tasks_.
|
| 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.
|
| Automation did the same with calculation and I doubt anyone
| misses that.
|
| "Job" is scary, "task" generally less so.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > RELAX. MACHINES ALREADY TOOK OUR JOBS
|
| 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] ...
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] Don't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so their
| lives are better now than 50 years ago"
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The robots aren't to blame for any of this. The reason the
| post-war period was great for the US was a mix of several
| things - but largely due to how much our credit was expanding.
|
| If robots can do a job that people could - this is obviously a
| good thing for us as a civilization. Whether the benefits are
| being shared equally is something we can work on.
|
| Credit, on the other hand, cannot expand infinitely.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| America also took a massive rake on the costs of rebuilding
| countries on their credit.
| bobkrusty wrote:
| agreed
|
| So many people live in extreme poverty who cant afford high
| education
|
| How they can even pay tuition
|
| How about people with disability
| tt433 wrote:
| I think workers rights has less to do with automation and more
| to do with forcing exploitative bosses to negotiate via
| collective action but what do I know
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _[0] Don 't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so
| their lives are better now than 50 years ago"_
|
| Why not?
|
| Communication is cheaper. In the past if you moved abroad or
| simply far enough then you would lose contact with your family.
| That's not the case anymore. Remember long distance calls?
|
| Transportation is cheaper/safer. Cars of today are way better
| than those from the past. Let alone anything preceding that.
|
| Food is cheaper. Cheaper transport means cheaper food. When is
| the last time a developed country had a famine? Can you even
| imagine something like that? Our immediate ancestors did.
|
| Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before.
| Life expectancy in 1950 was 68 years in the US, 72 years in
| 1975, 76 in 2000, and almost 79 in 2021. In my country life
| expectancy at birth has gone up 10 years during my lifetime!
|
| There's less violent crime. Violent crime has halved in the US
| since 1993. This might not seem related to automation and
| quality of life, but I think it is - if people are living
| better lives then crime should decrease.
|
| Housing has become more expensive, but housing seems to scale
| with income - if people have more disposable income in the
| area, then housing is going to be more expensive.
|
| > _retirement age is increasing_
|
| Perhaps this was unsustainable in the first place? They were
| effectively borrowing from future generations. Virtually every
| country in the world has been increasing retirement age
| significantly. Retirement policies were created at a time where
| the expectation was an ever increasing population. That has
| changed.
| everdrive wrote:
| >Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before.
| Life expectancy in 1950 was 68 years in the US, 72 years in
| 1975, 76 in 2000, and almost 79 in 2021. In my country life
| expectancy at birth has gone up 10 years during my lifetime!
|
| But life expectancy is decreasing. And not just due to COVID.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| While somewhat true, over the past few years life
| expectancy has moved from the high of 78.94 in 2013 to
| 78.81 in 2018, then rising slightly in 2019 before dropping
| to 77.8 in 2020.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Even if it was going up, you'd still spend all the good
| years working all day long. If you spend 90% of your
| healthy life working it doesn't matter if you live 70 or
| 150 years
| lm28469 wrote:
| Disclaimer: I have a very negative view on this topic, for
| good or bad reasons, I guess time will tell. But I feel like
| both sides should be expressed.
|
| > Communication is cheaper. In the past if you moved abroad
| or simply far enough then you would lose contact with your
| family. That's not the case anymore. Remember long distance
| calls?
|
| Yet increasingly more people feel lonely [0] [1]
|
| > Transportation is cheaper/safer.
|
| Which make low wage people live further away from their
| workplace (ie cities, because they can't afford it), adding
| hundreds of hours per years to their commute (which aren't
| compensated, adding both mental and financial stress) [2] [3]
|
| > Food is cheaper.
|
| And of lesser quality, more people than ever are obese in the
| west too, which imho is a sign of a deep issue and might be
| related to the general social misery (coping mechanism) [4]
| [5] [6]. Thanks to globalisation when someone fucks up on the
| other side of the planet everyone pays the price [7] [8]
|
| > Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before.
|
| And it's starting to go down almost everywhere in the west
| [7] [8]
|
| > Perhaps this was unsustainable in the first place?
|
| Perhaps it isn't the only unsustainable thing we started
| doing
|
| I'm not saying tech progress didn't improve quality of life.
| I'm saying that very often modern tech "progress" is social
| and human decline in disguise. Of course it's not all black
| nor white, but I feel like a lot of new tools are coming with
| more and more negative side effects attached and these are
| barely being talked about. Having an HD tv, netflix and cheap
| Mac&cheese won't do much to your quality of life when you
| have diabetes, a min wage job with no future perspective and
| you're not sure you'll be able to pay the next rent or your
| car payment.
|
| If you look at it from a purely technical point of view,
| sure, everything is amazing, we send shit on Mars, have 600
| miles autonomy electric smart cars, we all have computers in
| our pockets and can talk to anyone in the world instantly.
| When you look at it from a human, psychological and social
| point of view things aren't getting better, especially at the
| bottom of the social ladder
|
| Running water, central heating, the fridge, the radio, the
| telephone, early internet, all of these were a thousand times
| more useful to the average person than anything we came up
| with in the last decades. I'm talking real world usage that
| truly improve quality of life, not the carrot(s) on the
| proverbial stick(s) that keeps low skilled workers commuting
| in their shitty cars to work their shitty jobs for 45 years
| straight until they're thrown in a retirement house to rot.
| No amount of automation or tech thrown in the current
| framework will solve these issues
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2020/01/23/7986764...
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/loneliness-is-rising-
| younger...
|
| [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25195346?seq=1
|
| [3]
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11116-019-09983-9
|
| [4] https://www.cornucopia.org/2007/06/more-evidence-that-
| food-n...
|
| [5] https://www.simplysupplements.co.uk/healthylife/infograph
| ics...
|
| [6] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
|
| [7] https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/09/multi-country-
| recalls...
|
| [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contamin
| ati...
|
| [9] https://www.businessinsider.de/international/us-life-
| expecta...
|
| [10] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-life-expectancy-
| slips-wit...
| mjburgess wrote:
| Do you have evidence that problems in the past that these
| _replaced_ were better than these?
|
| Progress has a "flooring effect", eg., if we solve murder,
| the leading cause of death is heart disease. Heart disease
| wasn't as common in an era where people, on average, didn't
| live long enough to experience it (etc.).
|
| Have you properly accounted for this effect?
|
| Because when I look at the list of problems people had in
| the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem _far far far far_
| worse; by orders of magnitudes.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > if we solve murder, the leading cause of death is heart
| disease. Heart disease wasn't as common
|
| Sure but all these things are increasing
| disproportionally. I don't think the obesity rate of
| americans tripled since the 70s because the murder rate
| dropped.
|
| > Because when I look at the list of problems people had
| in the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem far far far
| far worse; by orders of magnitudes.
|
| I agree with you to a certain extent up the the 70s/80s,
| I don't think the average westerner's life got better
| since the 70s because of tech progress, but rather
| because of social progress.
|
| To me running water is a better tech than internet.
| Central heating is better than the smartphone. Virtually
| anything that came up since the 90s are either iterative
| progress over existing tech or straight up gadgets. We're
| now enslaved to them but they're not necessary to our
| well being.
| mjburgess wrote:
| When all our appliances solve all our problems, the
| problems which remain are more prominent.
|
| No one complained in 1990 at not being able to go to the
| cinema, etc., whenver they liked (netflix); to coordinate
| with friends without hours of conversation (messenger);
| to search for materials without days at the library
| (google).
|
| These were taken for granted and are now reduced to
| "seconds of time".
|
| Tech since the 90s has led to a _massive increase of
| wealth_ via making our time vastly more productive: both
| social and economic.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I don't feel like we're looking at the right metrics to
| judge if people's lives actually get better. If all you
| focus on is production/consumption then yes, sure, we've
| never produced and consumed as much, but consumption of
| goods and entertainment hardly is enough to fulfil a
| life. We see it very often on hacker news, people trying
| to "optimise their lives", "be more productive", not
| everything has to be about productivity, you can't
| quantify "social" productivity, the simple fact of
| writing "social productivity" makes me sick to be honest.
| We're applying machine concepts to human interactions...
| what's the best: 10M instagram followers or a loving
| family ? Who's the most socially productive here ?
|
| > massive increase of wealth
|
| Yes, but again, once you're past a certain point
| perceived wealth isn't a benchmark for quality of life. A
| min wage worker has a faster car than kings from the 15th
| century, they also have better beds, better heating
| systems, &c. do they have better lives ? And this isn't
| even talking about the fact the the massive wealth
| increase was highly beneficial to a very limited number
| of people while the rest got the crumbs
|
| A unit of out time is more productive, but we still spend
| as many unit of times working than 50 years ago for less
| and less rewarding jobs. Being stuck in a dead end
| meaningless job is a daily reminder that your time is
| worth next to nothing since you perceive your mission as
| useless and you're paid the bare minimum.
|
| If all you care about is productivity we're twice as
| productive as in the 70s [0], are we twice as happy as
| then ? And by "we" I don't mean "tech workers making 2-10
| times their country's min wage". The vast majority of
| people still have to work 8 hours a day until retirement,
| less and less are able to afford homes, &c.
|
| I'm not against technology, that would be ridiculous,
| google search and google maps are literal miracles, but
| there is a flip side to tech and automation which is
| becoming increasingly hard to bear for a lot of people. I
| find that telling these people to suck it up because they
| have on demand cinema and facebook messenger a bit
| insulting.
|
| I lived on both sides, it doesn't matter if you have
| barely enough money to pay for a shelter or if you have
| enough money to buy any new amazon gadgets, all things
| being equal as long as you spend 8 hours a day working
| you'll still be missing out by the simple fact that
| between work and sleep you'll barely have time to get
| entertained. "Panem et circenses"
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-
| productivity-per-ho...
| Bakary wrote:
| Much of that wealth has filtered down to the masses, but
| the vast majority of it has been captured by rent-seekers
| or first-movers.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Netflix etc. has just resulted in us spending less time
| on the things that make us happy (time with friends and
| family and socializing) with things that are addictive
| but make us less happy (endlessly staring at pixels).
| lm28469 wrote:
| I'd say it's worse than that, they offer the perfect
| counter argument to soul crushing jobs. Get home, unplug
| your brain, spend 3.2 hours on netflix [0], go to bed and
| forget about everything else. Yes, your life is miserable
| but tonight you'll be offered a new episode of that
| quirky baking show.
|
| [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-netflix-subscribers-
| watch-32-h...
| chungus_khan wrote:
| Even if the conclusion is that life today is better than
| in the past, so what? Congratulations. Their lives were
| different than their predecessors too. Is the whole point
| to self-congratulate, or should we recognize and address
| today's problems?
| mjburgess wrote:
| The issue is often that people with dystopian visions of
| the present and utopian visions of the past/future rarely
| have policies that are effective at actually redressing
| problems.
|
| Routinely their dystopianism drives them to revolutionary
| ideas whose net effect has always been mass
| impoverishment.
| chungus_khan wrote:
| And people with utopian perceptions of the present tend
| to have policies that ignore underlying problems until
| they boil over into revolutions.
|
| Fixating on how great the present is accomplishes nothing
| and appeals to almost nobody.
|
| A typical feudal serf probably lived better than a
| hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't
| want to be free, and telling them that things are better
| is just avoiding the question.
|
| Any analysis which fixates on things being uniformly
| better or uniformly worse will paint an incoherent and
| unhelpful picture. A realistic look at things involves
| looking critically at present and past policy in a
| nuanced manner, even in areas where things may be better.
| jimbokun wrote:
| What are concrete ways life has improved since the 1970s?
|
| I lived through the 1970s. We had enough good quality
| food, home cooked meals, and far less obesity. I had
| friends to play with in the neighborhood, bicycles to
| ride, independence ("be home for dinner!"), ball fields
| and basketball courts, toys, a library I could walk to
| with lots of books, lived close to extended family, big
| back yards, could walk to school, church, grocery stores,
| family gatherings on holidays. TV and radio for news and
| entertainment, which we watched too much, but not nearly
| as addictive as today's devices. Atari for video games.
|
| I was fortunate enough to be accepted to a good
| university, and was able to pay off my student loans in a
| few years.
|
| I don't remember as many people going bankrupt from
| medical bills (although people were starting to complain
| about the increasing costs).
|
| It's not clear to me in what ways life is objectively
| better today. I'm sure many people in the 1970s were
| worse off than me, but we were squarely lower middle
| class. A lot of people had more than us. I imagine life
| is better for racial and sexual minorities, and that
| shouldn't be taken for granted. But I don't think life is
| better for the median middle class person.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'm about middle of Gen-X and I also enjoyed many of the
| things you describe.
|
| I also did not enjoy the chance to learn about, discuss
| with experts (and interested novices), niche topics.
| Programming for me was few hundred line programs saved to
| audio tape or typed in from magazines. I had much less
| concept of the world in which we actually live than my
| kids do. Sure, I had the same Replogle globe that you
| probably did, but I didn't know that people lived
| significantly differently lives outside my neighborhood.
| I just figured it was daytime earlier or later than it
| was for me. When I wanted to learn something, my parents
| had to drive me to the library. It might take me an hour
| to learn a single fact that I can access as fast as I can
| type the query now. If it's something new, it might not
| even be in the library at all, despite being known to
| mankind already. When I wanted to take intro college
| classes after exhausting the high-school's offering, I
| had to commute to college as a HS senior. When we wanted
| to go on vacation, we had to get a bunch of folding paper
| maps and plot out the route. Or laboriously copy down
| directions from a friend. If I wanted to be reachable, I
| had to stay near the phone (what we'd call a landline
| now). Air conditioning was a relatively rare treat. If
| you wanted to watch a movie at home, you had to drive to
| the rental place and hope that they had one of the 5-ish
| copies of the movie you wanted to see in stock.
|
| Plenty is better, especially around comfort, convenience,
| communications, and educational breadth of opportunity.
| (And a lot is also worse, of course.)
| sbazerque wrote:
| An interesting complement to your view is questioning the role
| of work in our ethics and sense of purpose, as elaborated for
| example in Russell's "In praise of idleness".
| lm28469 wrote:
| Thanks, I'll have a look at that
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| esoterica wrote:
| Housing is not getting that much more expensive outside of
| superstar metros. Services provided through labor-intensive and
| low-productivity jobs have gotten more expensive due to
| Baumol's cost disease (not just landscaping and home repairs,
| but also education and healthcare).
| pizza234 wrote:
| This article is a very interesting example of capitalization on
| the Lump of labour fallacy.
|
| Two examples made it very obvious:
|
| 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)
|
| 2. cleverly, what the article doesn't show, it describes, in
| ridiculous terms:
|
| > from the point of view of, say, a 10th century farmer, over
|
| > 90% of the jobs we do now are effectively made up-make-work
|
| > stopgaps that simply prove, in the words of Mark Twain, that
|
| > "civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary
|
| > necessaries."
|
| so, 90% of the jobs that didn't exist in the 10th century are
| essentially... vanity.
| rakkhi wrote:
| I thought the article was a good balanced perspective without
| providing a conclusion either way. Thus wanting to start the
| debate here :)
| pydry wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 _really_ believe jobs are being
| automated.
|
| It's interesting that the media drives both mutually
| contradictory narratives at the same time.
| agumonkey wrote:
| What would senior do ? I think people prefer to stay in the
| group they worked but as a different kind of role, elder/wise
| still being part of the field but without as much pressure and
| more of a transmission/consulting role.
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