4 ms·

As a developer who writes software that does work that replaces the work of people, I've often wondered if my work is somehow pushing us toward the end of capit

by rpeden 10y ago

As a developer who writes software that does work that replaces the work of people, I've often wondered if my work is somehow pushing us toward the end of capitalism. I've also wondered what that end of capitalism and post capitalism will look like if and when it happens. My hypothesis has been that while it would be nice to live in a world where we're free to spend more time with friends and family doing things that actually, actually getting there will be a long, messy, and painful process. Perhaps some of the upheaval we've seen in the Western world lately is part of that? A lot of the recent anger and anti-establishment sentiment seems to be centered around jobs disappearing. That collective anger is easy to exploit - savvy leaders and politicians can direct it toward things like immigrants and outsourcing, because I think it is easier for people to conceptualize their job disappearing because another person took it, rather than disappearing because it was automated. And I don't mean that as political criticism, or as criticism of people who are angry about lost jobs. I think it's rational to be angry about it, and it's rational and smart for politicians to address it. It seems to me that the desire for cheaper labour is the ultimate cause of all of this, and that immigration and outsourcing are just transient proximate causes - hiring less expensive immigrants (legal or otherwise) or outsourcing to a low cost country are contributing factors right now, but they're becoming less so as technology becomes less expensive. I expect that trend to continue. What I wonder is whether eventually, the collective anger about job loss will be increasingly directed at those of us (both people and companies) who are creating the technology that replaces human labour.

crdoconnor 10y ago
"A lot of the recent anger and anti-establishment sentiment seems to be centered around jobs disappearing. That collective anger is easy to exploit - savvy leaders and politicians can direct it toward things like immigrants and outsourcing, because I think it is easier for people to conceptualize their job disappearing because another person took it, rather than disappearing because it was automated." It's easier to manufacture consent for trade agreements and austerity if you can convince people that a robot took their job instead of a Chinese or Mexican worker and that fighting back would be pointless. "outsourcing to a low cost country are contributing factors right now, but they're becoming less so as technology becomes less expensive" If the last time 95% of (agricultural) jobs were automated and it didn't end up causing 95% unemployment I can see reason to be skeptical of this idea. I can definitely see why our ruling classes would like us to feel insecure about our jobs and powerless to fight the various trade agreements and austerian measures which hurt us, though. Beware the magic robots!
- rpeden 10y ago
  Good point. We've been through periods before where most of the jobs in a sector were replaced by automation, and overall we've been able to adapt and prosper. It's not just robots. It's been 6+ months since I've used a human cashier at McDonald's. As a consumer, I love it. The automated kiosks make so many options much more discoverable. Want a Junior Chicken with pickles and onions added, and chipotle or thai sauce instead of mayo? No problem, it just takes a few taps on the screen. When ordering from a cashier, I'd never have known those options were available. Of course, now there are far fewer cashiers. It's certainly possible (and probably likely) that freeing up people to do more important work is a net benefit in the long term. In the interim, there will be plenty of people upset that there currently aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants to work. I also wonder whether increasingly powerful technology makes it possible that we'll see a sort of "black swan" step change that is so out of line from what we've seen in the past that we can't really conceive of how it would happen or how it will impact society. Maybe it's useless to wonder about that, though. If I can't conceive of how such a change would happen, there's not much I can do to prevent it or prepare for it.
  - VLM 10y ago
    How many Junior Chicken with pickles and onions does the unemployed cashier order? When its your turn thru the chipper shredder of the economy and you will never again have money, how many Junior Chicken with pickles and onions will you order at that time? Remember its only a matter of when, not if. When there's no one left with money to buy a Junior Chicken with pickles and onions does that mean the economy "won"? And who exactly is doing this "winning"? And whats the next step? The problem with the historical analogies is no reaction mechanism is specified, or if one is provided its invalid or inapplicable (perhaps the new mechanism works, but only if all participants IQ are above 140...). Without a plausible reaction mechanism, its just a gamblers fallacy. Say you're temporarily in a temporarily advanced civilization. You're playing a game where you flip a coin and every time it comes up heads, civilization not only survives but gets better, while every time it comes up tails the civilization collapses and most people die and there's nothing but ruins. In fact your world has no shortage of academics and the archeological ruins of dead civilizations that they ruminate over. Back to the game, so far every time your civilization flips the coin it came up heads, therefore its impossible for it to ever come up tails at any time in the future. Sounds logical, right? I do wonder why those other civilizations all failed, sometimes we're not smart enough yet to know, or there's no longer enough evidence, or using 20/20 hindsight and Monday morning quarterbacking it seems very self evident. Whatever, I got a coin that can only come up heads lets flip it a couple times, what could possibly be the downside?
pif 10y ago
No one took our jobs. We gave them our jobs when we started pretending our salary was more worth than it actually was. If we want our jobs back, we must accept either a Chinese-level salary or to pay more just because production is local. In any way, we must give up the added value that our salary gained when we started buying cheaper without questioning where the rebate was coming from. It worked for some time: we could buy more goods with the same salary. Until the salary was no more.
- VLM 10y ago
  "In any way, we must give up the added value" Often the added value is just not caring about people far away dying. Fundamentally a lot of low labor goods are offshored because the toxic waste dump is someones backyard, if employees die due to lack of safety gear that's simply not an issue, etc. If we were honest with ourselves we'd use trade policy either to foist the EPA and OSHA on the entire planet, or remove them as a restraint against locals. People usually are not honest with themselves of course.
VLM 10y ago
There are tail wagging dog problems. Is the purpose of an economic system to generate the largest pile of capital and damn those obnoxious humans for getting in the way or expecting a quality life or even expecting to survive? Whats important is the piles of money in themselves. Or is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway? The French Revolution can be looked at on a large scale of trying to run a sem-industrial pre-industrial nation using an agricultural medieval economic operating system. It simply didn't work anymore and the population was suffering horribly from it. Trying to do the wrong, old fashioned thing harder, mostly resulted in making people even unhappier and more guillotine chops in the end. Likewise if the capitalist system means almost everyone is going to be very poor, very angry, and very desperate, then trying to do more of the same old thing that screwed everything up is just going to result in the guillotines being busier sooner this time around. Not so much OPs post, but I see a lot of free floating condescension on HN along the lines of, well, I guess people with an IQ below 120 just won't be participating in the economy anymore. Oh they had the misfortune of being born in the wrong geographic area? Their parents weren't rich, too bad. Should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Won't happen to me. As for them, well all thats certain is it sure sucks to be them! However realize that historically "it sucks to be them" for only a certain integrated quantity of suck and time, before heads start filling baskets and things are much worse in the short term and staggeringly better in the long term. No man has ever watched his child starve and die, thinking to himself, well, it was for the maximal efficient allocation of capital, so its OK, in fact here's my other kid, if it'll only help boost the DJIA some more.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Or is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway? There is no purpose. Markets arise out of aggregated self interest eg. I need to eat and I can work on something that someone else wants that they will give me food for; or I want to play sports, people will pay to watch me play sports. The history of humanity is that we build technologies that optimize for most efficiently satisfying human needs and wants and we are doing amazingly well at it. Worldwide poverty is at an all time low, violent deaths are at an all time low etc... Currently the majority of humanity choose not to produce their basic food needs, so about 2% of people do that work. Ok, now extend that to everything, both need and want. In such a system if an individual wants to build their own X and company Y produces it more efficiently, and the plurality of others choose that more efficient one, then they will not be able to compete and there is nothing for them to do. It's not a value proposition it's a math problem. It's also not condescension, it's reality. Do you feel bad for horse carriage makers?

by rpeden 10y ago

crdoconnor 10y ago

"A lot of the recent anger and anti-establishment sentiment seems to be centered around jobs disappearing. That collective anger is easy to exploit - savvy leaders and politicians can direct it toward things like immigrants and outsourcing, because I think it is easier for people to conceptualize their job disappearing because another person took it, rather than disappearing because it was automated." It's easier to manufacture consent for trade agreements and austerity if you can convince people that a robot took their job instead of a Chinese or Mexican worker and that fighting back would be pointless. "outsourcing to a low cost country are contributing factors right now, but they're becoming less so as technology becomes less expensive" If the last time 95% of (agricultural) jobs were automated and it didn't end up causing 95% unemployment I can see reason to be skeptical of this idea. I can definitely see why our ruling classes would like us to feel insecure about our jobs and powerless to fight the various trade agreements and austerian measures which hurt us, though. Beware the magic robots!

rpeden 10y ago
Good point. We've been through periods before where most of the jobs in a sector were replaced by automation, and overall we've been able to adapt and prosper. It's not just robots. It's been 6+ months since I've used a human cashier at McDonald's. As a consumer, I love it. The automated kiosks make so many options much more discoverable. Want a Junior Chicken with pickles and onions added, and chipotle or thai sauce instead of mayo? No problem, it just takes a few taps on the screen. When ordering from a cashier, I'd never have known those options were available. Of course, now there are far fewer cashiers. It's certainly possible (and probably likely) that freeing up people to do more important work is a net benefit in the long term. In the interim, there will be plenty of people upset that there currently aren't enough jobs for everyone who wants to work. I also wonder whether increasingly powerful technology makes it possible that we'll see a sort of "black swan" step change that is so out of line from what we've seen in the past that we can't really conceive of how it would happen or how it will impact society. Maybe it's useless to wonder about that, though. If I can't conceive of how such a change would happen, there's not much I can do to prevent it or prepare for it.
- VLM 10y ago
  How many Junior Chicken with pickles and onions does the unemployed cashier order? When its your turn thru the chipper shredder of the economy and you will never again have money, how many Junior Chicken with pickles and onions will you order at that time? Remember its only a matter of when, not if. When there's no one left with money to buy a Junior Chicken with pickles and onions does that mean the economy "won"? And who exactly is doing this "winning"? And whats the next step? The problem with the historical analogies is no reaction mechanism is specified, or if one is provided its invalid or inapplicable (perhaps the new mechanism works, but only if all participants IQ are above 140...). Without a plausible reaction mechanism, its just a gamblers fallacy. Say you're temporarily in a temporarily advanced civilization. You're playing a game where you flip a coin and every time it comes up heads, civilization not only survives but gets better, while every time it comes up tails the civilization collapses and most people die and there's nothing but ruins. In fact your world has no shortage of academics and the archeological ruins of dead civilizations that they ruminate over. Back to the game, so far every time your civilization flips the coin it came up heads, therefore its impossible for it to ever come up tails at any time in the future. Sounds logical, right? I do wonder why those other civilizations all failed, sometimes we're not smart enough yet to know, or there's no longer enough evidence, or using 20/20 hindsight and Monday morning quarterbacking it seems very self evident. Whatever, I got a coin that can only come up heads lets flip it a couple times, what could possibly be the downside?

pif 10y ago

No one took our jobs. We gave them our jobs when we started pretending our salary was more worth than it actually was. If we want our jobs back, we must accept either a Chinese-level salary or to pay more just because production is local. In any way, we must give up the added value that our salary gained when we started buying cheaper without questioning where the rebate was coming from. It worked for some time: we could buy more goods with the same salary. Until the salary was no more.

VLM 10y ago
"In any way, we must give up the added value" Often the added value is just not caring about people far away dying. Fundamentally a lot of low labor goods are offshored because the toxic waste dump is someones backyard, if employees die due to lack of safety gear that's simply not an issue, etc. If we were honest with ourselves we'd use trade policy either to foist the EPA and OSHA on the entire planet, or remove them as a restraint against locals. People usually are not honest with themselves of course.

VLM 10y ago

There are tail wagging dog problems. Is the purpose of an economic system to generate the largest pile of capital and damn those obnoxious humans for getting in the way or expecting a quality life or even expecting to survive? Whats important is the piles of money in themselves. Or is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway? The French Revolution can be looked at on a large scale of trying to run a sem-industrial pre-industrial nation using an agricultural medieval economic operating system. It simply didn't work anymore and the population was suffering horribly from it. Trying to do the wrong, old fashioned thing harder, mostly resulted in making people even unhappier and more guillotine chops in the end. Likewise if the capitalist system means almost everyone is going to be very poor, very angry, and very desperate, then trying to do more of the same old thing that screwed everything up is just going to result in the guillotines being busier sooner this time around. Not so much OPs post, but I see a lot of free floating condescension on HN along the lines of, well, I guess people with an IQ below 120 just won't be participating in the economy anymore. Oh they had the misfortune of being born in the wrong geographic area? Their parents weren't rich, too bad. Should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Won't happen to me. As for them, well all thats certain is it sure sucks to be them! However realize that historically "it sucks to be them" for only a certain integrated quantity of suck and time, before heads start filling baskets and things are much worse in the short term and staggeringly better in the long term. No man has ever watched his child starve and die, thinking to himself, well, it was for the maximal efficient allocation of capital, so its OK, in fact here's my other kid, if it'll only help boost the DJIA some more.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Or is the purpose of an economic system to make people happy... or happy enough, anyway? There is no purpose. Markets arise out of aggregated self interest eg. I need to eat and I can work on something that someone else wants that they will give me food for; or I want to play sports, people will pay to watch me play sports. The history of humanity is that we build technologies that optimize for most efficiently satisfying human needs and wants and we are doing amazingly well at it. Worldwide poverty is at an all time low, violent deaths are at an all time low etc... Currently the majority of humanity choose not to produce their basic food needs, so about 2% of people do that work. Ok, now extend that to everything, both need and want. In such a system if an individual wants to build their own X and company Y produces it more efficiently, and the plurality of others choose that more efficient one, then they will not be able to compete and there is nothing for them to do. It's not a value proposition it's a math problem. It's also not condescension, it's reality. Do you feel bad for horse carriage makers?