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"
>[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.
>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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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"
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?
>Their lives were different than their predecessors too.
You don't have to go back far to get to a point where this wasn't really the case. Before the industrial revolution, life for the common person was rather similar to how their parents and grandparents lived. Estimates of GDP per capita would give you a doubling or tripling of it over a period of 1000-2000 years. A similar increase happened in the US in the last ~50 years.
Life is improving so much that we take it for granted. We've seen many facets of life significantly transformed in our lifetimes - eg social media, video games, the internet as a whole.
Of course we should look at today's problems, but we should also look at the past for perspective. If we make a mountain out of every molehill then we might end up regressing.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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
"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.
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.
The problem is that company funded training is dead. There are some leftover countries like Germany that do formal apprenticeships with reduced pay and they tend to have lower youth unemployment but they are the exception. I know some people who just did an apprenticeship in their 30s and got a new job that way.
The alternative would be to have a government mandated long term unemployment insurance program that funds education. It would be a general solution to career loss of any kind. I personally dislike that coal worker communities are being protected by the government. If there was an effective program that helped these people get better jobs we wouldn't even have to worry about protectionism.
The big unsolved problem is people who are 10 years away from retirement. They can't just spend 3-5 years retraining without delaying their retirement.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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
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.
>that's almost nothing you can do that'll raise IQ by a few points - at best
Actually, poverty can drive IQ down. You can raise your intelligence by not being poor. By instating government policies that prevent the worst kind of poverty you can directly drive IQ gains.
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.
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...
> 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
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
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.
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 €$ Eurodollars.
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
Before someone gets the funny idea that they aren't. It's literally government policy to hit at least 2% CPI inflation. CPI inflation measures the ratio between demand of consumer goods and services versus its supply. 2% inflation means there a tiny bit more demand for economic activity than can actually be supported by the economy.
This means there is an incentive for companies to grow and try to max out the production capacity of the entire country. This is especially important since production capacity cannot be saved in the literal sense. Money is just a piece of paper that says someone owes you a certain share of their production capacity. If you don't make sure the production capacity exists by the time you retire your money is worthless, which is why deflation is generally considered a death sentence for economies. Low demand causes companies to reduce their production capacity, which reduces employment and lowers demand in a vicious circle.
Demand side inflation through government stimulus can be effective way of accelerating the recovery of an economy with high underemployment. By doing pointless busy work like investing into better internet, upgrading the electric grid, building out renewables or even building public housing you can make sure that there is a baseline of employment. Since this work is funded through government debt it is increasing the supply of money. As I already have said. Inflation is what happens when you exceed the production capacity of your nation it tends to accelerate during full employment. Once there is enough work for everyone people get to choose their employers and they obviously pick the highest paying ones. Governments raise interest rates to make sure that only the most productive companies get funding. Inflation goes down and hits the 2% target again.
The big question is why does the central bank engage in ineffective policy? Why would it keep dropping interest rates when most corporations are already well funded and their biggest problem is that there isn't enough demand for their products? You need to give money to people but if they aren't credit worthy how isn't this just a central bank driven pump and dump since you're only giving money to those who don't need it?
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
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.
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).
> 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 ?
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.
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.
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.
The problem with building a country around resource exports is that it becomes highly profitable to import basic needs like food. Domestic production cannot compete because there is an excess of foreign currency in the country and using that currency on food is better than simply accumulating it.
I'm not exactly sure how to counteract this. A potential solution would be to introduce tariffs on consumer goods like food and a government program that subsidizes local food production with the tax income from the tariffs.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 :)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
> Before anyone says that "labour theory of value" has been proven false
Or: take a random sample of n > 1000 products from the MIT Billion Price Project, and establish the labour content of each. I guarantee the correlation coefficient between labour content and price will be over 0.9.
In social science, academics take anything over 0.3 as strong proof of a claim.
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.
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.
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"