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Technical innovation moves and concentrates the savings to the top of the chain. Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in t

Technical innovation moves and concentrates the savings to the top of the chain. Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in the long term. Technical innovation permanently removes/drastically minimizes OpEx for those willing to put up with significant capital expenditure (in building the Technology in the first place): but once done, those jobs are gone. It made mining, telephone, retail, manufacturing etc companies drastically minimize their dependence on human labor. These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline. Next up is transportation. Most governments dont want to be bothered with transportation and run it inefficiently. New companies are capitalizing on this to establish future oligopolies: https://www.quora.com/What-controls-help-ensure-the-growing-ride-share-companies-dont-eventually-hold-us-ransom-after-public-private-transportation-has-eroded-away https://www.quora.com/What-controls-help-ensure-the-growing-... Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation. Electric (and autonomous) vehicles are going to be the next PC era that is going to change the world for decades and build the new billionaires.

Eridrus 10y ago
I am curious if anyone has done an analysis to see how much of the capital expenditures going to automation goes to labor vs profits/return on capital. I could definitely see the case that almost none of it is going to labor in the end, but it would be interesting to see a real study.
dao- 10y ago
> These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline. This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;) And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.
- intended 10y ago
  Well if you dont generate value in society, what will society do with you? Or any system for that matter? I may not personally support such a view, but from a purely functional stand point, you are about as much value as you earn and can therefore afford.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Isn't that an incredibly individualist standpoint - that nobody has duty nor obligation towards others?
  - scarecrowbob 10y ago
    Well, the problem then becomes "what do all these folks who have no 'value' to a society do to that society when they realize have no 'value'". That's probably also a problem from a "purely functional standpoint", but it's compounded by folks who think there is some kind of natural law that says "value" === "economic productivity" when that's only true for a subset of societies.
  - goatlover 10y ago
    Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed for more and more automation? Your value is that you're human being. Let the machines be enslaved to producing goods and services for the humans.
    - krapp 10y ago
      > Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed for more and more automation? That's the capitalist way of thinking about people. Old fashioned or not, it dominates the lives of most people on the planet, and the value of most lives can be summed to a precise monetary amount - that being the value of the labor extracted from them by society over their lifetime, as determined by the market. We should be considering what to do about the likelihood that most people made redundant by automation will simply be left valueless to society. No one seems to actually be trying to use automation to build a utopia and free everyone from the struggles of work. Rather, automation is allowing the elite to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of supporting society through compensating human beings for work.
jlksdfpoiuasdf7 10y ago
I don't follow this line of thinking. If automation implodes labor markets, no one has money to buy goods/services produced by robots. What exactly is there to be concentrated at the top? I feel you're underestimating the potential for radical change. Remember, we've only been a predominantly "capitalist" system for ~150 years (when the term began referring to a framework for economic management. Prior it was a noun referring to individual capital owners, for the most part.) It's not set in stone it'll survive. I can see autonomous vehicles imploding things like Taco Bell too. We have fast-food burrito making machines. Why can't we have a rover delivering food, avoiding going on the road? Or why go to Walgreens for Preparation H at 1AM when a rolling pharmacy can drop them off? They can roll up, I'll walk out and swipe a phone or card and get the stuff I requested. Bookmobile's for every thing are a possibility. Wouldn't necessarily need to go to Amazon Go. Once this technology becomes mainstream, what's to stop people rolling their own local autonomous services for their communities (after another 10-20 years of smoothing out kinks)? Only accepting deliveries from bulk producers? What's to stop an autonomous Car2Go like network of cars moving about to pick up passengers as needed? Thus imploding automobile sales, but reducing load on infrastructure, saving communities a shit ton of time and money? Above all, what's to stop the world from skinning capitalists in the streets if they insist they own everything we invented, and oops, no more money to buy things. Excuse us while we take advantage of your outputs. Millennials are already feeling pushed to the periphery, with gloomy prospects around wages, and debt. Populist anger is in the open right now. As things continue to go autonomous, I have a hard time thinking we'll just adapt it all to our current way of life.
crdoconnor 10y ago
"Our recent research casts doubt on the hypothesis that technology-driven developments were a major factor behind rising inequalities in advanced countries. Let me start with some facts about jobs. Both the European Union and the United States are characterised by strikingly similar labour force developments. In both regions, there has been a decline in the number of jobs for workers with low levels of educational attainment over the past 25 years. Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous increase in jobs for workers with tertiary education, and this is the only job category that expanded after 2008, even in several countries that were hit hard by the recent global and European financial and economic crises. While underemployment, when a worker takes a job for which they are over-qualified, is a prevailing phenomenon, it tends to be temporary. If a greater share of jobs are only open to tertiary-educated workers, it could contribute to increasing inequality, if tertiary-educated workers earn ever more, relative to lower educated colleagues. Data shows that this has been the case in the United States and China, and to a much more limited extent in Germany. However, exactly the opposite has happened in many other countries during the past two decades, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden and Japan. In these countries the so called ‘skills premium’ has actually fallen." http://bruegel.org/2016/12/explaining-inequality/ http://bruegel.org/2016/12/explaining-inequality/

Eridrus 10y ago

I am curious if anyone has done an analysis to see how much of the capital expenditures going to automation goes to labor vs profits/return on capital. I could definitely see the case that almost none of it is going to labor in the end, but it would be interesting to see a real study.

dao- 10y ago

> These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline. This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;) And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.

intended 10y ago
Well if you dont generate value in society, what will society do with you? Or any system for that matter? I may not personally support such a view, but from a purely functional stand point, you are about as much value as you earn and can therefore afford.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Isn't that an incredibly individualist standpoint - that nobody has duty nor obligation towards others?
- scarecrowbob 10y ago
  Well, the problem then becomes "what do all these folks who have no 'value' to a society do to that society when they realize have no 'value'". That's probably also a problem from a "purely functional standpoint", but it's compounded by folks who think there is some kind of natural law that says "value" === "economic productivity" when that's only true for a subset of societies.
- goatlover 10y ago
  Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed for more and more automation? Your value is that you're human being. Let the machines be enslaved to producing goods and services for the humans.
  - krapp 10y ago
    > Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed for more and more automation? That's the capitalist way of thinking about people. Old fashioned or not, it dominates the lives of most people on the planet, and the value of most lives can be summed to a precise monetary amount - that being the value of the labor extracted from them by society over their lifetime, as determined by the market. We should be considering what to do about the likelihood that most people made redundant by automation will simply be left valueless to society. No one seems to actually be trying to use automation to build a utopia and free everyone from the struggles of work. Rather, automation is allowing the elite to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of supporting society through compensating human beings for work.

jlksdfpoiuasdf7 10y ago

I don't follow this line of thinking. If automation implodes labor markets, no one has money to buy goods/services produced by robots. What exactly is there to be concentrated at the top? I feel you're underestimating the potential for radical change. Remember, we've only been a predominantly "capitalist" system for ~150 years (when the term began referring to a framework for economic management. Prior it was a noun referring to individual capital owners, for the most part.) It's not set in stone it'll survive. I can see autonomous vehicles imploding things like Taco Bell too. We have fast-food burrito making machines. Why can't we have a rover delivering food, avoiding going on the road? Or why go to Walgreens for Preparation H at 1AM when a rolling pharmacy can drop them off? They can roll up, I'll walk out and swipe a phone or card and get the stuff I requested. Bookmobile's for every thing are a possibility. Wouldn't necessarily need to go to Amazon Go. Once this technology becomes mainstream, what's to stop people rolling their own local autonomous services for their communities (after another 10-20 years of smoothing out kinks)? Only accepting deliveries from bulk producers? What's to stop an autonomous Car2Go like network of cars moving about to pick up passengers as needed? Thus imploding automobile sales, but reducing load on infrastructure, saving communities a shit ton of time and money? Above all, what's to stop the world from skinning capitalists in the streets if they insist they own everything we invented, and oops, no more money to buy things. Excuse us while we take advantage of your outputs. Millennials are already feeling pushed to the periphery, with gloomy prospects around wages, and debt. Populist anger is in the open right now. As things continue to go autonomous, I have a hard time thinking we'll just adapt it all to our current way of life.

crdoconnor 10y ago

"Our recent research casts doubt on the hypothesis that technology-driven developments were a major factor behind rising inequalities in advanced countries. Let me start with some facts about jobs. Both the European Union and the United States are characterised by strikingly similar labour force developments. In both regions, there has been a decline in the number of jobs for workers with low levels of educational attainment over the past 25 years. Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous increase in jobs for workers with tertiary education, and this is the only job category that expanded after 2008, even in several countries that were hit hard by the recent global and European financial and economic crises. While underemployment, when a worker takes a job for which they are over-qualified, is a prevailing phenomenon, it tends to be temporary. If a greater share of jobs are only open to tertiary-educated workers, it could contribute to increasing inequality, if tertiary-educated workers earn ever more, relative to lower educated colleagues. Data shows that this has been the case in the United States and China, and to a much more limited extent in Germany. However, exactly the opposite has happened in many other countries during the past two decades, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden and Japan. In these countries the so called ‘skills premium’ has actually fallen." http://bruegel.org/2016/12/explaining-inequality/ http://bruegel.org/2016/12/explaining-inequality/