Human labor is not obsolete. Take the old trope that the infrastructure in the U.S. is crumbling--is it crumbling because we've run out of bricks, or because we don't want to pay anyone to do the work?
There is tons of work for people to do. The real problem is twofold:
1. Global trade makes unskilled labor in wealthy countries compete with laborers in developing countries. This pushes their wages to converge, which is really ugly for the people on the developed world side.
2. Utility is hard to measure in skilled labor positions, and companies are clumsy, so offices end up with a lot of bullshit jobs, and bullshit jobs are about signaling, not productivity. As more people work in cubicles, this gets worse.
There are too many unskilled or weakly skilled jobs left undone for the cause of our current economic ills to be human beings becoming obsolete.
While I am not a fan of this style of writing at all (to me it seems overcomplicated when it could make its main points much more simply and clearly), I definitely agreed with this point:
> In short, what today’s flexible software is threatening is to “free” us from the drudgery of all repetitive tasks rather than those of lowest value, pushing us away from expertise (A) which we know how to impart, toward ingenious Rube Goldberg like opportunities (B) unsupported by any proven educational model.
I've been arguing for some time that people who think that new technology, while killing some current jobs, will also open up a host of new jobs, are really missing the point with what kinds of new jobs are being created. More and more, the types of jobs that add value are the types of jobs where really only the best add much value: think sports stars, actors, Instagram influencers, but also graphic designers, writers, and even programmers to an extent. In those jobs, the very best take the vast lion's share of income because what the best produce is valued so much more highly than everyone else. Meanwhile, all kinds of "repetitive" jobs, even current high value jobs like radiologists or pathologists, are at risk of being automated away.
The problem is you can't really run an economic system where only a very few percent of people take all the gains, at least not one that is socially stable or resembles liberal free market capitalism of the past 100 years.
> More and more, the types of jobs that add value are the types of jobs where really only the best add much value [...] In those jobs, the very best take the vast lion's share of income because what the best produce is valued so much more highly than everyone else.
Your perspective is in agreement with studies in network science, which have uncovered that in a wide variety of physical, biological, and man-made phenomena, the network models follow a power law distribution, and as a result, you end up with situations such as, for example Kim Kardashian having 130M followers, while the average Instagram user probably has about 1-2k followers. Other similar distributions: income, research paper citations, world wide web, etc.
It appears that uneven distributions are inevitable in free human networks, or as Will & Ariel Durant once noted:
> Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.
Perhaps I’m wrong in my observation, but my overall sentiment of your comment is that you’re too eager to simplify things.
Unrelated to the above part of my comment, but:
> Without deliberate, aggressive redistribution, accelerating inequity is inevitable.
People are willing to embrace redistribution way too hastily, while ignoring higher order consequences. If we embrace more aggressive redistribution, to what extent, how effective, to what long term cost, etc?
Perhaps redistribution is so seductive because it promises some laudable social outcome while also being easier to understand than competing alternatives.
Top-down engineering solutions to complex human problems should cast doubts imho. That is not to say we shouldn't strive to solve the challenges of our society, but we ought to always be mindful of its complexity.
Tangentially related to our conversation, but I found this paper on politics + complexity [1] – albeit still a draft – helpful.
Absolutely. I've gotten great mileage out of simplification. I code the same way. My rule of thumb is that if you can't explain something, you probably did it wrong.
My approach offends most geeks and wonks. Oh well.
I'll give an example. After years of thrashing on election integrity, with vendors and admins dragging everyone through the weeds of policy and arcana, I finally figured out the whole argument comes down to "private voting, public counting". Period. Any deviance from that is capitulation. You can advocate for something else. But it's not democratic.
From my vantage, compared to me, most everyone else is bike shedding, being too clever by half, pushing rope. Or worse: obfuscation, obstruction. I can stomach it for a while, like when I'm getting up to speed on an issue. But once I figure out someone's just stalling, I lose interest in hearing any more.
Top-down has its place: designing market places, establishing inalienable human rights, the big stuff. But for implementation, like our current welfare regime, it's paternalistic and dehumanizing. I prefer bottom up distributed decision making solutions, like UBI, wherever feasible.
I am very interested in complexity vs governance. I believe (but cannot prove) that a lot of stuff is just too complicated to reason about. Like our health insurance system.
I don't think people do repetitive, automatable jobs because they can't do any other kind of job, but rather because our current market conditions make it a good choice for them.
And by market conditions I mean everything from wages to availability and cost of education to immigration policies and welfare benefits.
Once the dust has settled after major advances in automation I don't see why people wouldn't be able to work as managers, designers, programmers and engineers even if those were the only jobs left in the economy (but of course there are many more skilled jobs that will not be automated anytime soon). It's just a matter of training and expectations.
I don't think a world where people only need to work 20 hours a week, and where we have 5x the number of every kind of skilled specialists we have right now is a bad place to be. And it doesn't require ditching capitalism entirely, just regulating it differently (taxation, welfare, etc.).
It's only the transition to such a world that is worrying because it will happen faster than people can adjust, not the end result.
>The problem is you can't really run an economic system where only a very few percent of people take all the gains...
I could be wrong here, but I think the commenter, and the author of the article, are speaking on the bipolar nature of creative jobs like manager, designer, or programmer. The value of different designers and programmers to, say, Apple and Google, is kind of bipolar right now. The concern being that it will be more bipolar in the future. Right now we have the 5 or 6 figure a year sort of "warm body" programmer, and you are correct in asserting that anyone can do that job. But, we also have the 7 figure programmer, and only the very best can do that job.
I think their concern is what if the 7 figure Apple designer turns into a high 7 or 8 figure Apple designer, and the "warm body" designers get less and less over time? Kind of like athletes. A few 8 or 9 figure soccer and basketball players, and then all of the others. Most of whom will never be able to make a living at their sport professionally. (Consider: How many young girls did our athletics infrastructure chew through to get Simone Biles? I don't really know? But I'm guessing it was a lot.)
I think it's a fair concern. Certainly well within the purview of the sort of concerns we should be war gaming out at the policy making level.
All that said, yeah, your world of 20 hours a week sounds pretty sweet to me.
I don't see why programmers, chemists, researchers, engineers, etc. compensation would follow the way of athletes. Those specialists are paid for skilled use of their time, they are not paid for being famous. If you have more skills, you get paid more, that's ok. Those fancy 10x programmers don't make regular programmers less valuable though.
As for the entertainment industry - too many people agree to be underpaid for a chance to become famous one day. A career in those industries is not employment, it's running a personal brand business. No surprise that outcomes are so unequal.
While it may not be as extreme as athletes or entertainers, you already see tons of evidence of the huge discrepancy in programmer salaries right here on HN.
In every thread about programmer salaries, invariably you'll have a comment about "Senior/Staff developers making $300/$400k+", then some comments from folks saying "I've never heard/seen anything close to those numbers", then other comments about "Those numbers are totally doable at FAANG companies." Valued programmers at the best companies already make several multiples of income over 90%+ of the rest.
It has already happened. You absolutely did not see these astronomical programmer salaries 20 years ago (indeed, one reason they've become so astronomical in the past 5 years is equity comp tied to companies that have tripled in value). The reason that top programmers at FAANG companies are able to make so much money is the "automation" of the Internet where you have, for example, a situation where only TWO companies take in nearly 60% of all online digital ad dollars (and that percentage has only recently been falling because Amazon is taking some share).
The concentration in market share that the Internet allows also allows for a corresponding concentration in programmer salaries/talent.
And yet despite the monopolies and despite the superstar compensation for top programmers at Google, mediocre programmer salaries did not suffer. Because everyone still needs mediocre programmers. Because they still provide a lot of value.
Fighting off monopolistic tendencies and the disproportionate influence of monopolists and oligopolists – both economic and political – is already one of the greatest challenges of capitalism.
Automation makes this problem worse because our political institutions are corrupt and incapable of fixing the rise of monopolies, not because automation is bad in itself. And unlike brand recognition, lobbying, and other barriers that monopolists put up to keep their moat safe, automation is generally available to everyone, so it doesn't make sense to penalize it.
Inequality is a product of market regulations, not automation. Put a 90% tax on income over $1M, make 20 hour work week / 12 weeks vacation the new standard, introduce a land value tax, make it impossible to hide wealth offshore, and find a good way to distribute all the extra revenue so that people don't starve but still have just enough incentive to work (in a world that needs much less work because of automation). That'll go a long way towards fixing excessive inequality in a heavily automated world. Half of this can be done to great positive effect even today.
I don't know, maybe that's "a whole new system" that the author theorized that we need. But really it's just turning a bunch of knobs on the existing system. We haven't tried even that much, and everyone's already spelling doom.
> Inequality is a product of market regulations, not automation.
Inequality arises naturally out of many different processes. You can think of the economy right now as being Pareto optimal or efficient; any reallocation of capital will necessarily make one person worse off than another. It is an example of the power law distribution.
> Put a 90% tax on income over $1M, make 20 hour work week / 12 weeks vacation the new standard, introduce a land value tax, make it impossible to hide wealth offshore, and find a good way to distribute all the extra revenue so that people don't starve but still have just enough incentive to work (in a world that needs much less work because of automation). That'll go a long way towards fixing excessive inequality in a heavily automated world. Half of this can be done to great positive effect even today.
That sounds to me like the way to hell paved with good intentions. If you increase the tax rate to 90% over $1M, those individuals will simply move their assets elsewhere. What's stopping them from investing in real estate in Japan (where you can still get good deals, because the dollar is still relatively strong, even though it soon won't be)? Wealth redistribution sounds nice in theory, where you can feel good about yourself because hey, you're saving the world right? Except you're making things worse. All those wealthy individuals you want to heavily tax will stop hiring here, and suddenly you have a population of very angry people that cannot work anymore. The illusion of a living wage is better than no wage at all.
The conclusion of the article, to me, is that the concept of a central bank and a State is obsolete. The future is rich city states with zero regulation, Pareto optimally efficient economies, surrounded by wastelands of those left behind. This is what the Singularity entails.
> You can think of the economy right now as being Pareto optimal or efficient
That's true but I'm not sure how that's relevant. The economy is Pareto efficient because it's literally impossible to make a significant change without making someone worse off, not because the current state is somehow good. This doesn't mean we can't make tradeoffs that will be better than the status quo (just not Pareto-better).
> It is an example of the power law distribution
People can tolerate such distributions as long as the vast majority who gets the short end of the stick has it pretty well off. That is the current situation. With automation we will see a higher concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer people. Whether it's natural or not is inconsequential if this puts most people into misery. They will not stand for it, and the society will collapse, but that will not happen because no one wants that, not even the rich, so the government will find some way to redistribute the tax revenue to make sure everyone can live comfortably enough that they don't need to riot. There's really no way around this redistribution if automation will indeed end up a serious problem.
> If you increase the tax rate to 90% over $1M, those individuals will simply move their assets elsewhere. What's stopping them from investing in real estate in Japan (where you can still get good deals, because the dollar is still relatively strong, even though it soon won't be)?
I am talking about a world where automation has eaten most jobs but the economy keeps producing a similarly high GDP (because all the same jobs are being done, just more efficiently), except the wealth is much more concentrated than today and needs to be distributed to a higher degree than today so that people don't starve. My back of the napkin suggestions are for that world.
In that world, other countries face the exact same problem because automation is not bound by country borders, and their governments will face the same pressures. The situation in different countries will not be perfectly equal of course, but neither are countries equal today (by tax rates or wages or environmental regulations), and we're able to manage that with visas, customs, tariffs and other barriers on international trade.
Even today the ultra rich and big corporations avoid taxes by parking money abroad. It's already a problem, it needs fixing regardless of automation and the taxation changes it will likely bring.
There is nothing special about how we happen to be doing things right now. All the tax rates, work hours, work culture, trade barriers or lack thereof – all that and more will change on a dime if we actually have a reason to change that. And with automation we very well might. Even 40 years ago the US had 70% marginal tax rates in the top bracket, and it's not like they were facing mass unemployment or any other crisis.
Yes, thank you, that is exactly my point. The nature of creative work (the kind that is least likely to be automated) is that the output can be highly variable (think Botticelli's paintings vs 99% of everyone else), and thus it is impossible with that type of work to create a broad base of jobs where lots of people (percentage-wise) are well compensated.
Another way to think of it is not just "repetitive vs non-repetitive" jobs, but "variable vs. well defined output" jobs. It may be currently very difficult to become a radiologist, but at the end of the day a diagnosis is either accurate or it isn't, and those types of "right-or-wrong" jobs are the ones most amenable to automation. So what you're left with are non-automatable jobs where the output can be highly variable, and in those highly-variable output jobs all the gains go to the very best.
Creativity in arts and creativity in engineering and other skilled labour are vastly different.
You don't need to be a Botticelli programmer to provide value to your employer because being famous or unique is not how programmers provide value. Programmers are paid for solving business problems. The variability of that is not going to dramatically increase due to automation.
Even today you can tell that mediocre programmers are earning good wages while mediocre painters / sculptors / actors are starving. It is not because they have been automated.
> Even today you can tell that mediocre programmers are earning good wages
Today mediocre programmers still provide value, that's because there are not yet good enough tools that would make these developers obsolete. These tools are coming within the next 10 years.
Speaking as a competent but unexceptional programmer, I find this an alarming claim. Have you any links to worthwhile articles/research on this topic?
If I really am going to be thrown on the developer scrapheap, I guess I should start thinking now about how I'm going to keep a roof over my kids' heads.
I'll believe it when I see it. So far none of the website builders, low code platforms, rapid app development tools, etc. made a dent, and not for lack of trying.
With a best of the best system, you've got to work all waking hours to have a chance of being the best.
So rather than 20h each, we should see some people working a lot, and then a lot of people realizing they have no chance of making it and dropping out of the system completely.
We're at a crossroads. There's different roads we can go down. There's different ways this whole thing can develop. What we look like when we come through this might be pretty ugly? Or not? We don't really know right now?
We just have to hope that society's stewards are being responsible and considering these very real mechanisms when settling on plans for our long term future. These forces are not going anywhere. Technology is with us to stay, the only question is how we live with it.
And that article only highlights my point. When it comes to AI, the very best solutions will take virtually all of the value. If your autonomous car program only fails .0000001% but another autonomous car program fails even less often at .00000005%, eventually the first program is going to be essentially worthless. Of course programs are not always exactly comparable along a single metric, but my point should be clear.
I don't understand why that would be the case. Unless the autonomous car program is free, there will always be room for a lower-quality, cheaper alternative.
Indeed, this is a good question. Along with 7 figures, what about assets vs liabilities: I'm curious how many programmers think about this part of the equation over their career? Except for shares, as you write, I wonder how many are investing those assets into new ideas - to, in turn, build more valuable assets to grow their wealth?
You can, it has already been done. History repeats itself etc etc.
The Roman state was powered by slaves ( which is the ancient form of automation ) and the plebs were basically unemployed citizens. It worked, it created a system where the richest people competed for power by public moves and schemes.
>The problem is you can't really run an economic system where only a very few percent of people take all the gains, at least not one that is socially stable or resembles liberal free market capitalism of the past 100 years.
I don't understand this sentiment in the context of the world I live in. If you had to choose which point in history and which place you'd be born into, not knowing your race/gender/sexual preference/family income/level of health it seems very obvious to me that the best time in all of history to be born is right now. And the list of places that are even considerable as best places to be born to is fairly small, but slowly growing. If right now is the best possible time to be born for the "common man" and most people reading this are in list of best places, how can we be so concerned about social stability? Do you disagree with that general sentiment? Over all, is there a different time in history you'd choose to live?
Now I want to be clear that I'm not claiming today is perfect/ideal/etc. in any way. We surely have many problems in life. But I genuinely don't understand where this feeling comes from. Could you help me understand?
Is OP saying that today sucks? I don't think so. I think what they are saying is that the direction society seems to be heading doesn't seem to be one that will sustain the common man. What are your thoughts when you hear about "vanishing middle class"?
I think the middle class hasn't been vanishing, it's been expanding into other parts of the world, particularly in India and China. The common man (globally) has more prosperity today than they have ever had. I think many people mistake an accident of history, the relative prosperity of white men in America after WWII as being something other than an aberration. Our stuff just happened to not be destroyed, so we did pretty well. And we're still nominally better off today than we were then, we're just not relatively better off compared to other people in other places because they're catching up to us.
But even the rise of "the common man (and woman)" in places like India and China only further highlights my point. Rich Western countries have essentially treated labor in India and China like another form of automation - we don't yet have robots for a certain class of tasks that can perform the work at 25% of the cost of a Western worker, but India and China DO have people willing to work at that price. But what do you think will happen to those workers in India and China when we DO build robots that can do those repetitive tasks?
Are you arguing that the best time to be a woman was a few years ago when their life expectancy was one month longer? Okay, I'll accept that. Is the decline somehow the result of Jeff Bezos making even more money compared to the average woman in the last few years? Remember, wealth inequality is original proposed root cause of our supposed civil instability. Please try to tie these things together.
How does there being more people with more wealth in more places highlight your point at all? It seems to be a complete refutation of it.
I expect the people in India and China to slowly transition into service economy jobs, much like the people in the US and other wealthy Western countries did.
I'm just speaking for my experience in the US, but I definitely disagree that now is the best time to be born. For your "average person" the best time to be born was about 50-80 years ago (obviously racial disparities complicate this a great deal).
But my viewpoint also seems to bear out in lots of social science evidence in the US, where there has been an explosion of "diseases of dispair", e.g. suicide, drug-use, disability, etc. among large sub-populations in the US.
Not just racial disparities. Women make up slightly more than half the population. Even if we just limit our scope to white men, I don't see much argument for the idea that white men have it nominally worse off today than they had it 50-80 years ago. I only see that they are not as far ahead of women and racial minorities as they were 50-80 years ago. And 70 years ago was the end of WWII. I assume it was an accident to include that in your range.
Regarding the explosion of "disease of dispair", suicide, drug use, etc. I do acknowledge that but I don't see how it's related to the OP. The OP appeared to be talking about relative wealth as being socially disruptive. Let's run a thought experiment there. If we could magically decimate the wealth of everyone with over $1 Billion, without changing anything else, do you believe the "diseases of despair" situation would improve? I personally do not believe it would.
My personal belief on that issue is that we've gained one kind of social safety net but lost another. There's seemingly countless ways in which the government offers programs to help people avoid certain kinds of suffering: unemployment insurance, medical care for the poor, disability insurance, social security, etc. But somehow we've managed to lose the other kind of social safety net... strong social ties to the community. I believe this latter thing is the root cause of the disease of despair, and I don't believe any check cut by the government, or any tax program that reduces the wealthy can resolve that problem. Just one anecdotal piece of evidence here is the TED talk about our lack of understanding of addiction.
50 years ago it was possible to buy a house and raise a family on a single working class income, this is rare now and becoming rarer. We've got bigger TV's and smart phones, but we've gone backwards where it counts.
> But somehow we've managed to lose the other kind of social safety net... strong social ties to the community.
When you're renting and don't have employment with long term stability it's a lot harder to put down roots.
> I believe this latter thing is the root cause of the disease of despair, and I don't believe any check cut by the government
A lot of that community comes from things like sports fields, scout halls and the like that governments pay for. Another thing that builds them is bars, but government is taxing the small community bars out of existence, at least around here.
I dislike your first point because there's no comparing the quality of mass-produced housing 50 years ago and that of today's mass-produced housing. It IS possible to purchase a home on a single working class income - look up prices for a double wide trailer; put on foundation. They would also be roughly equivalent square footage, and the double-wide would actually be sturdier.
It's not that simple. A lot in the midwestern college town I live in costs more than the inflation adjusted median total house+lot price from 70 years ago and trailers are against zoning laws.
"The problem is you can't really run an economic system where only a very few percent of people take all the gains, at least not one that is socially stable or resembles liberal free market capitalism of the past 100 years. "
I agree partly, you can run it but it has to be social. To put it very blunt and anti-social, the rich will have want to buy off being robbed by the poor, or build very high fences around their lives, in almost all aspects. In other words, if this continues: revolution and unpredictability.
I used to love (and still do, but we're growing apart) Ayn Rand but I think this is something she never predicted. Rational, smart people, willing to work but somehow ending up at the wrong side of the fence. The rich becoming the looters, disrespecting rights of the "poor".
I really don't care how we accomplish it. Radical cashectomies, UBI & Medicare for All, Warren's taxation of equity (eg %3/yr for > $1b), Green New Deal.
While I usually have a strong aversion to articles hinting at anti-market sentiment, I found this to be quite good. I really liked the point about the growing prominence of information technology growing the share of the economic value contributed by public goods.
This however is wrong:
>>We have strong growth without wage increases.
Economic growth is still strongly correlated with wage growth. Much of the supposed decoupling between productivity and wage growth is a result of different standards of inflation being used for the two, and the two standards diverging over time.
The majority of the decline in the rate of wage growth in the developed world is due to a decline in the rate of GDP growth.
The world as a whole has seen the largest gain in wage growth and largest decline in poverty in human history over the last 20 years.
I'm extremely wary of trends being stated as if they're inevitable, rather than due to explicit choices. The entire field of popular economics is rife with this, obscuring overt state policies as if they are scientific fact.
> Using Orwellian terms like "Quantitative Easing" or "Troubled Asset Relief", central banks print money and transfer wealth to avoid the market’s verdict.
We're getting closer here. But overall it's not to avoid the market's "verdict" when things come to a head, but something much more persistent and plain.
What's failing about capitalism is the capital part. Obviously not those ever-concentrating pools bidding up every possible investment to avoid being left behind. But rather that capital isn't permitted to remain distributed throughout the economy (which would enable individuals to shoulder their own risks), but instead is trickled upwards through the old playbook of inflation.
This is an explicit choice being made, while its proponents pretend it's unquestionable. We're in an era of unprecedented technological deflation, doing things more efficiently every day, yet the cost of living is still expected to continually rise?!
We're automating away ever more jobs, while simultaneously asserting that employment must remain high. And when it doesn't remain high the alchemists' prescription is to further debase wages and middle class savings, as if the only thing keeping displaced workers unemployed is simply not having the screws turned on them hard enough!
We've had over four decades of steady deflation of computing technology itself. And not simply that a given model would be cheaper tomorrow, but that tomorrow's computer will be able to do things today's literally cannot. Yet we still bought new computers throughout this period, even knowing they would be obsolete on a timescale of several years.
The deflation bogeyman was born out of an era where slow price signals were necessary to negotiate demand. We now have cheap communication, predictive models, and straight up abundance. People will not starve themselves simply because they know food will be less expensive next month.
> And when it doesn't remain high the alchemists' prescription is to further debase wages and middle class savings, as if the only thing keeping displaced workers unemployed is simply not having the screws turned on them hard enough!
does inflation really hurt the real value of people's retirement accounts? or are you implying that middle class savings are primarily cash?
> does inflation really hurt the real value of people's retirement accounts?
Yes, of course it does. The higher the rate of inflation, the higher the rate of return on your retirement account has to be to give you the same amount of buying power when you actually retire.
Retirement accounts generally aren't liquid, and to the extent they are people really don't want to treat them as such. So yes I do mean to say that the economic power of the middle class is essentially held in cash.
>A next problem is that software replaces physical objects by small computer files. Such files have the twin attributes of what economists call public goods:
>The good must be inexhaustible (my use doesn’t preclude your use or reuse).
>The good must be non-excludable (the existence of the good means that everyone can benefit from it even if they do not pay for it).
Software may not be inexhaustible, but it generally does require regular maintenance and updates, as well as support for the end-user. For me, these facts weaken the value of the thought experiment tremendously.
Much software needs much less maintenance than it gets.
Or at least it could. Constant upgrade cycles are expensive and increasingly unnecessary.
As a thought experiment: could you take the current generation of iPad and keep producing a 100% compatible version for 100 years? If so how much software maintenance would you need? Would that be useful?
People are very accustomed to a fast upgrade cycle and so thing something a few years old is ancient, but it doesn't need to be like this. A whole lot of software could be engineered to completion and then left only to occasional maintenance requirements.
At the very least, browser vendors would need to keep shipping new versions because web standards continue to change rapidly. It's already the case that some web developers complain about Safari not keeping up.
I suppose someday web standards could be considered "done" but we're nowhere near a consensus on that. I couldn't see Chrome ever doing this and imagine the complaints if someday they said "okay, good enough."
> A whole lot of software could be engineered to completion and then left only to occasional maintenance requirements.
The iPad isn't software, it's hardware. It's very hard to predict what hardware upgrades users might really want a few years from now. So even if all the software on the iPad could be engineered to last a hundred years, it would still need to be updated every time the hardware changed.
But we aren't at the level of automation the author envisions as necessary to take us out of free market dynamics that underpin capitalism. Until we get there, software will need to be upgraded and maintained to continue the march in that direction. I work with ERP systems, and this is very much the reality. What we have now is significantly better than 20 or 30 years ago. While they are arguably still filled with cruft and bloat that has accumulated over that period of time, their ability to automate tasks has greatly improved, with enormous room for improvement still present.
In the case of an ipad, your argument might hold if we were to hold hardware features stagnant. But better cameras and screens are obvious upgrade paths that will require software upgrades. Folding screens will undoubtedly require new ways of thinking about UI and UX with concomitant software upgrades. Your right, we don't need to keep chasing such hardware upgrades, or improvements to software defined features. However, if we don't, we also don't really reach the post-scarcity society that the author of the article posits either.
Maintenance and updates are just more bits, which can be copied just as easily as the original bits were, so the same two attributes apply to them.
User support is different, yes. But user support is a service, not a product; users will pay for it if they gain enough value from the support to make it worth it. But for many pieces of software, the set of users for whom that is true is small or even empty.
(1) >Economic theory, like the physics on which it is based
(2) >Price is nearly equal to value except in rare edge cases of market failure
The first quote is more controversial than the author suggests.
Then he continues that while economics cannot make accurate models of the world, it's still 'just like physics in using accurate heuristics.'
Then one such heuristic, quoted (2), is, to someone with economic training, an obvious and perfect example that economics is based on the social science of people, psychology, and moddeling human behavior relies on subjective understanding. In fact, here is the Subjective Theory of Value. It states people define value in markets by marginal utility, which is a psychological phenomenon. Diamonds are valued more than water because of our psychology, not because of any physical laws dictating how much aggregate value is added to humans and their civilizations from either water or diamonds. This was even a very famoud paradox in economics, the Diamond-Water paradox.
Here is what I mean in other words: I find it frustratint that Economics is conveniently absolved from rigor and responsibility of the scientific method as the experimentation step is practically impossible. But despite that, economists cite their maths prowess and claim they're 'fundamentally an extension of physics.' Finally, they conclude that while they don't have accurate models, they do have some great tools (then point to theories formulated in social psychology).
If anyone's interested, Eric Weinsten was the guest on the latest episode of Lex Fridman's AI Podcast[1].
I'd listened to it last evening and he mentions this article on the show and I'd added to my reading list.
I'm pleasantly surprised to find a discussion around the article on HN, just before I was about to read it.
My impression is the author is stating that traditional market forces of capitalism break down under the weight of things like software and the future of disintermediated manufacture via 3d printing and similar DIY manufacture. In short, he posits a post scarcity economy. Maybe we'll get there, some day, but we're far, far away. Even zero-cost marginal production is insufficient for this. Also, he laments the lack of something to replace free market capitalism while lampooning as gimmicks some of the actual mechanisms that have evolved to address the failure modes of free market capitalism, like monetary policy (quantitative easing), that take us towards a model, even if the term is Orwellian in what it obscures.
The article describes the marginal cost reduction, as expected in laissez faire capitalism, but it points to government regulated markets as an example.
What or ruining is the central bank and politically based market, while the digital and decentralized market is arising. This new model (pure capitalism) have many characteristics that communists have pursuit, like goods sharing and lower "surplus", this it's the result of increase of goods availability and market competition.
This article falls prey to a myopic view of capitalist vs communist 'econ'. The reality is that the 19th and early 20th centuries were abuzz with economic tinkering and innovation. Rather than a simple left/right dichotomy, there is a whole color palette of possibilities, if only only we can remember them, and then imagine them in a modern context.
Proudhon early on imagined a world without capitalist ownership, but with a free market. He expounded the idea of Mutualism, building from earlier writers like John Gray. This libertarian-socialist vision has little in common with either the state socialism of the USSR, or the internationally-corporate world we live in today. Socialism as social ownership of the means of production, either by workers (agricultural or factory coops), communities (in our time, municipal fiber), or users/consumers (credit unions are a descendant of mutualist credit systems).
Later socialists argued over the recompense owed to individual labor vs the community as a whole (Bakunin v Marx), over the methods to reach their aims (through socialist parties, or revolution and establishment of a proletarian state, or through direct expropriation as the syndicalists and anarchocommunists did in Spain).
Later writers and revolutionists fought against imperialism, against racism and apartheid, for feminism and LGBT rights, and now for the rights of animals and the environment.
We have always allowed some few to take the lion's share of our collective efforts. To run our mutual efforts like their private fiefdoms. We tolerate in privately-held companies what we never would in public democracy.
And now, now that the world has been globalized and new markets exhausted, they look to privatize our public lands, our schools, prisons, thoroughfares, and every other system held in common.
Programmers are waking up to their exploitation. There is more talk of forming coops and unionizing than I have ever heard. However, I hope you all (and we) keep in mind that our affluence, now or future, also rests on the inherited exploitation of others in our past and around the world. Let's not be like the white American socialists who were exclusionary towards others' struggles (and whose efforts were broken when the capitalists brought in those they excluded as scabs). Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past. But to do that, we need to know them.
I think the author is specifically saying that the economic dichotomy that pits capitalism vs communism no longer holds. Basically that modern technology has taken us (and continues to take us) to a point where all of that is moot, but what replaces it has yet emerge. I somewhat disagree, I don't think the economy has moved or is about to move on to quite the degree he seems to believe, and that certain things like modern monetary policy are some of the early vehicles that take us beyond that dichotomy.
There is tons of work for people to do. The real problem is twofold:
1. Global trade makes unskilled labor in wealthy countries compete with laborers in developing countries. This pushes their wages to converge, which is really ugly for the people on the developed world side.
2. Utility is hard to measure in skilled labor positions, and companies are clumsy, so offices end up with a lot of bullshit jobs, and bullshit jobs are about signaling, not productivity. As more people work in cubicles, this gets worse.
There are too many unskilled or weakly skilled jobs left undone for the cause of our current economic ills to be human beings becoming obsolete.