5 ms·

I think you assessment of the article is fair. It's not the best piece I've read on this topic, but I found it interesting enough to share on HN. Do you think

by rpeden 10y ago

I think you assessment of the article is fair. It's not the best piece I've read on this topic, but I found it interesting enough to share on HN. Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense? With software that already replaces a lot of human labour, and things like 3D printing continually improving, it seems like it's at least possible for us to reach a point where the means of production are so easily available and so dispersed throughout the population that the current system as we know it won't really make sense anymore. So I'm not even sure "postcapitalism" would be the right word to describe it. Things will still be produced, and the idea of markets won't go away. But this new system might not be recognizable to us at all. I often wonder if we can even envision how the transition could happen, because we're so used to reality as it exists for us now. I don't mean to sound like a naive technological utopian. I suspect that something better than what we have now is possible, but the transition, if it happens, will be messy and painful.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense? The short answer is yes I do - in fact I'm betting on it. The functional problem however is distribution of resource production/demand. A functional market requires that some Agent A has some resource X that they can trade with Agent B for resource Y for some exchange rate. The medium of exchange (currency) is an important aspect to the efficiency of this but is too complicated to factor in to this discussion. If the plurality of Agents do not have a resource that is in demand then they have nothing to trade and thus their optionality is severely limited. For all periods of time individual labor was the default resource that people traded. Either they traded it to themselves in the form of time for output of land (farming for ones self), they traded it for goods from someone with those goods, or they traded it for a medium of exchange (currency). If the "market" effectively drives the price of labor to 0 then the productive input for any Actor basically evaporates. That doesn't mean the market evaporates, it simply means that individuals have no pricing power inside of it. So the idea of your average individual controlling the means of production is put into jeopardy - which I think is what the Author meant to say. Ok, so then what? Well that's when you see projects to redistribute resources to Actors with no pricing power introduced - such as UBI. Such schemes however rely on an increasingly small number of Actors to provide the resources which are then redistributed into the system. The libertarian proponents of such systems assume that the small groups will voluntarily redistribute these resources, which could be the case. Pro-state proponents suggest making the state redistribute the resources - essentially ending the "capitalism" - though the author doesn't suggest this. I think functionally this redistribution at scale is impossible with the human animal. IMO the human desire for unfettered agency is too strong to accept such a construct. I'm not sure what the answer is but I think it's gonna get nastier before it gets better.
- marvin 10y ago
  How do you bet on a future like this occurring? It's hard for me to see how to ensure that you get a positive payout if this happens. Owning machines (stocks?) would seem like a sensible bet, but how do you ensure that your part of the capital won't be obsoleted?
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    How do you bet on a future like this occurring? You build it. how do you ensure that your part of the capital won't be obsoleted? Best as I can figure is be the one that builds the machines taking over.
- Dylan_ 10y ago
  The default resource is time and people will always want to trade for more of it. What does a world look like where people have no value to each other?
pif 10y ago
> Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap... Just a pet peeve of mine: making labour (and life in general) cheaper, is not only a matter of technology progress (in the sense of human knowledge getting richer and richer) but also of what energy sources nature provides. As an example, the steam engine was a huge breakthrough and James Watt did change the fate of humanity, but it would not have been possible without coal veins. Our economy is based on oil, but how long will it last? We can invent more and more kinds of machines, but we'll need new sources of exploitable energy. We may learn to recognize currently-unknown kinds of sources, but we'll never be able to create them.
- rpeden 10y ago
  That's a great point, of course. More technology typically requires more energy, which doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Although newer technology tends to require less energy per unit of work/computation, in aggregate the amount of technology in use increases rapidly enough that net energy requrements increase as well. I'm hopeful that solar power will play an increasing role. Our sun won't last forever, but barring catastrophe it'll be there on any timescale those of us living now care about. Of course, solar's effectiveness depends on how much the energy captured by solar panels exceeds the amount of energy requred to manufacture them. I get that sense that solar power's efficiency and cost effectiveness continue to improve rapidly, but most of my information on the topic comes from mass media. It's an area I'd like to know more about, but I don't currently have enough time to do the research needed to properly understand it in depth.
- snrplfth 10y ago
  But a lot of what that technology does is reduce the energy cost of doing any particular thing - so naturally, we do more of it because it's cheaper, but for the same energy input we're getting much more. When calculations had to be done inside human brains, plus paper and abacuses, the cost - in energy - per calculation was huge. Now it's not, the cost is tiny. Even if energy becomes more expensive, you don't lose that advance. The same technologies we use today would work well with a whole range of energy inputs. Some would be easier than others, but most technological advances are, and have been, genuinely more efficient ways of doing things.
wybiral 10y ago
How do physical resources factor into this? Suppose we practically eliminate labor and manual production processes using machines. Consumers won't be able to trade their own labor for resources as most of them do now (since automated labor will be cheaper). It seems that he who owns the resources is king in this world. What could any else bargain to resource owners with?
- snrplfth 10y ago
  That's been the "theory" for a long time - say, the threshing machine will mean that farmers will be unemployed, the powered sawmill will put all the sawyers out of work, the spreadsheet program will put all the accountants out of work. The trouble with that theory is that people invent and move into new services and jobs. Sure, the old work was automated, but that just means that people can redeploy their labour into an work that simply wasn't being done before. Why doesn't this mean that resource-owners will control everything? Because "resources" are transformed by technology in the same way. Things that were previously not thought of as resources, become so. Secondly, one still imagines competition. There is no "he who owns the resources", there's many, and as long as they have to compete for the custom of the other 95% of the economy, they can't control, or coordinate to control, much of anything.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Newer jobs have always replaced older jobs, and the shift in job titles disguises this. When we say "farmer" now, we mean someone who uses electronics-enhanced tractors to plant and harvest at high yields on 1000 acres. But it used to mean someone who produced food from 5 acres with only human-operated tools. Later, it was someone who used ox-powered tools to produce on 20 acres. As the tech advanced, the job responsibilities changed. Accountants are no longer responsible for adding the numbers correctly in handwritten ledgers. They use computer spreadsheets. But they are still accountants. The market can either use less of them for the same work, or require that they do more work for the same number of laborers. The problem that is arising now, which did not arise in the industrial revolution, is that more employers are choosing the former option, simply because they cannot imagine more work for the same number of people to do that could not also be automated away. If the only way for cab drivers to compete with self-driving hire-on-demand cars is to become tour guides as well, it only takes a few more years to add a synthesized voice recanting trivia to passengers about nearby points of interest to the cab-driver-replacing software. As long as anyone has the intent to replace expensive human labor with cheap machine labor, no offer of additional added value is sufficient to save everyone's jobs. If no job is safe, how do you know which field to move into when your old one goes obsolete?

by rpeden 10y ago

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense? The short answer is yes I do - in fact I'm betting on it. The functional problem however is distribution of resource production/demand. A functional market requires that some Agent A has some resource X that they can trade with Agent B for resource Y for some exchange rate. The medium of exchange (currency) is an important aspect to the efficiency of this but is too complicated to factor in to this discussion. If the plurality of Agents do not have a resource that is in demand then they have nothing to trade and thus their optionality is severely limited. For all periods of time individual labor was the default resource that people traded. Either they traded it to themselves in the form of time for output of land (farming for ones self), they traded it for goods from someone with those goods, or they traded it for a medium of exchange (currency). If the "market" effectively drives the price of labor to 0 then the productive input for any Actor basically evaporates. That doesn't mean the market evaporates, it simply means that individuals have no pricing power inside of it. So the idea of your average individual controlling the means of production is put into jeopardy - which I think is what the Author meant to say. Ok, so then what? Well that's when you see projects to redistribute resources to Actors with no pricing power introduced - such as UBI. Such schemes however rely on an increasingly small number of Actors to provide the resources which are then redistributed into the system. The libertarian proponents of such systems assume that the small groups will voluntarily redistribute these resources, which could be the case. Pro-state proponents suggest making the state redistribute the resources - essentially ending the "capitalism" - though the author doesn't suggest this. I think functionally this redistribution at scale is impossible with the human animal. IMO the human desire for unfettered agency is too strong to accept such a construct. I'm not sure what the answer is but I think it's gonna get nastier before it gets better.

marvin 10y ago
How do you bet on a future like this occurring? It's hard for me to see how to ensure that you get a positive payout if this happens. Owning machines (stocks?) would seem like a sensible bet, but how do you ensure that your part of the capital won't be obsoleted?
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  How do you bet on a future like this occurring? You build it. how do you ensure that your part of the capital won't be obsoleted? Best as I can figure is be the one that builds the machines taking over.
Dylan_ 10y ago
The default resource is time and people will always want to trade for more of it. What does a world look like where people have no value to each other?

pif 10y ago

> Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap... Just a pet peeve of mine: making labour (and life in general) cheaper, is not only a matter of technology progress (in the sense of human knowledge getting richer and richer) but also of what energy sources nature provides. As an example, the steam engine was a huge breakthrough and James Watt did change the fate of humanity, but it would not have been possible without coal veins. Our economy is based on oil, but how long will it last? We can invent more and more kinds of machines, but we'll need new sources of exploitable energy. We may learn to recognize currently-unknown kinds of sources, but we'll never be able to create them.

rpeden 10y ago
That's a great point, of course. More technology typically requires more energy, which doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Although newer technology tends to require less energy per unit of work/computation, in aggregate the amount of technology in use increases rapidly enough that net energy requrements increase as well. I'm hopeful that solar power will play an increasing role. Our sun won't last forever, but barring catastrophe it'll be there on any timescale those of us living now care about. Of course, solar's effectiveness depends on how much the energy captured by solar panels exceeds the amount of energy requred to manufacture them. I get that sense that solar power's efficiency and cost effectiveness continue to improve rapidly, but most of my information on the topic comes from mass media. It's an area I'd like to know more about, but I don't currently have enough time to do the research needed to properly understand it in depth.
snrplfth 10y ago
But a lot of what that technology does is reduce the energy cost of doing any particular thing - so naturally, we do more of it because it's cheaper, but for the same energy input we're getting much more. When calculations had to be done inside human brains, plus paper and abacuses, the cost - in energy - per calculation was huge. Now it's not, the cost is tiny. Even if energy becomes more expensive, you don't lose that advance. The same technologies we use today would work well with a whole range of energy inputs. Some would be easier than others, but most technological advances are, and have been, genuinely more efficient ways of doing things.

wybiral 10y ago

How do physical resources factor into this? Suppose we practically eliminate labor and manual production processes using machines. Consumers won't be able to trade their own labor for resources as most of them do now (since automated labor will be cheaper). It seems that he who owns the resources is king in this world. What could any else bargain to resource owners with?

snrplfth 10y ago
That's been the "theory" for a long time - say, the threshing machine will mean that farmers will be unemployed, the powered sawmill will put all the sawyers out of work, the spreadsheet program will put all the accountants out of work. The trouble with that theory is that people invent and move into new services and jobs. Sure, the old work was automated, but that just means that people can redeploy their labour into an work that simply wasn't being done before. Why doesn't this mean that resource-owners will control everything? Because "resources" are transformed by technology in the same way. Things that were previously not thought of as resources, become so. Secondly, one still imagines competition. There is no "he who owns the resources", there's many, and as long as they have to compete for the custom of the other 95% of the economy, they can't control, or coordinate to control, much of anything.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Newer jobs have always replaced older jobs, and the shift in job titles disguises this. When we say "farmer" now, we mean someone who uses electronics-enhanced tractors to plant and harvest at high yields on 1000 acres. But it used to mean someone who produced food from 5 acres with only human-operated tools. Later, it was someone who used ox-powered tools to produce on 20 acres. As the tech advanced, the job responsibilities changed. Accountants are no longer responsible for adding the numbers correctly in handwritten ledgers. They use computer spreadsheets. But they are still accountants. The market can either use less of them for the same work, or require that they do more work for the same number of laborers. The problem that is arising now, which did not arise in the industrial revolution, is that more employers are choosing the former option, simply because they cannot imagine more work for the same number of people to do that could not also be automated away. If the only way for cab drivers to compete with self-driving hire-on-demand cars is to become tour guides as well, it only takes a few more years to add a synthesized voice recanting trivia to passengers about nearby points of interest to the cab-driver-replacing software. As long as anyone has the intent to replace expensive human labor with cheap machine labor, no offer of additional added value is sufficient to save everyone's jobs. If no job is safe, how do you know which field to move into when your old one goes obsolete?