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> The free market still hasn't figured out a solution to that particular problem last I checked. Interesting, I think the entire industrial revolution is a ver

> The free market still hasn't figured out a solution to that particular problem last I checked. Interesting, I think the entire industrial revolution is a very strong counter example to that statement. We repeatedly automated the majority of jobs on the planet every few decades and we saw the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity for the majority of humans in all of history. Should we lament over those subsistence farming jobs that were automated away? The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan. We currently don't have mass unemployment from automation, and I don't agree with many of the reasons people express for worrying. The only arguments I've seen against mass automation are hints of some dystopian future where somehow robots are prohibitively expensive for all but the richest people, and goods will somehow be cheap enough from automation that non-automated manufacturing can't compete, but still expensive enough that if we don't work 40 hours a week we'll starve.

smallnamespace 10y ago
I agree with you, but just a reminder that the Industrial Revolution was also a time of mass civil unrest, war, nationalism, and the growth of revolutionary groups advocating the overthrow of the existing social and economic order (some of which succeeded, e.g. Leninist Russia). You could make a fairly strong argument that is was the very real threat of Communist revolution in Western Europe (e.g. Germany in the 1930s, or Italy and France post-WW2) that forced governments to adopt socialist programs that moderated many of the excesses of the market, or in the US, the massive government investment in the middle class as well as draconian anti-left measures that prevented a similar threat. We've so far ended up in a somewhat decent place, but if history is any measure, we're going to have a rocky next few decades if technology does end up destroying or transforming demand for labor. People generally don't go quietly when their livelihoods or place in the social order are threatened.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  War and civil unrest has been extremely common throughout the world long before the industrial revolution. If anything war and violence have declined since the industrial revolution started (read Steven Pinker's Why Violence Declined). So I don't see how you can blame the industrial revolution for any residual unrest.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    Absolutely, but the sort of violence in preindustrial societies tended to be predictable and chronic (like tribal conflicts), whereas the industrial revolution enables total war, genocide, nuclear war, and other industrialized, sudden forms of human butchery.
simias 10y ago
Just to be clear I wasn't arguing against mass automation, at this point it's pretty much unstoppable from my point of view (and good for us software engineers). But we still haven't figured out how to deal with the changes that automation brings. And as always, it's the weakest that suffers the most. >The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan. Obviously, which is why I think it's a good idea to have a few regulations in place so that we, as a society, might figure out our plan and how to make the transition a little less painful for those who have to suffer the consequences. Not that you argued against regulations in the first place but from your comments I assumed you and pm90 were of the libertarian kind.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  > But we still haven't figured out how to deal with the changes that automation brings I'll repeat the point: We have 250 years of experience of jobs disappearing to automation. The counterintuitive result is an enormously increased living standard for regular people. It's hard to compute by how much, but economists who try come up with a factor of 20x to 30x.
  - rboyd 10y ago
    Why would a 250 trendline to still hold relevance after the introduction of the transistor and the network? I don't think modern society is in any way ready to reoptimize for the accelerating displacement that robotics and ai bring.
    - jethro_tell 10y ago
      We've had automation of physical tasks for a long time. Automation of mental tasks is a whole different ball game. People who think we're seeing more of the same game have no idea. You can't compare a machine being stronger/faster than a person to a machine being smarter than a person. It's not the same thing, and we aren't ready for it, partly just because people don't recognize the difference between the two.
st3v3r 10y ago
Because it's not the same? People moved from subsistence farming to factory work because there were jobs, and they didn't require a whole lot of specialized skill or training to do. Now those factory jobs are going away, and there isn't anything really taking it's place. There was a graph not to long ago that showed the most common job in each state. In a huge swath of them, that job was "Truck Driver". What're those people going to do to put food on the table or a roof over their family's head when those jobs are automated away?
- jdreaver 10y ago
  My point is it's never the same. No two technological advances are the same. We should be celebrating the fact that labor-saving tech is freeing us from mundane jobs. The goods produced by those jobs will be cheaper for everyone. Technological progress always brings jobs that require more skill, yet somehow over the last two centuries we have always had room for unskilled workers. Now, I'm not some heartless jerk who doesn't recognize that the short-term effects of job loss on unskilled workers. It is certainly a hard problem, but I'm still not convinced that we will have some epic labor shortage because all unskilled jobs will vanish too quickly.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    What does it matter that the goods are cheaper if you don't have a job to provide income to purchase said goods? And while labor-saving tech is, overall a good thing, there are lots of people still counting on those mundane jobs to put food on the table. And so far, no one is willing to think of what happens to them, or prepare for when those jobs go away. And if we don't do that, if we rely on "the market" to do the right thing, we will see that epic labor shortage which leads to the dystopian future.
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
      You realize that you could have made the same argument over the past 200 years? "Who'll buy all the farm produce when there are no fRm workers left?"
xapata 10y ago
If market shifts are state transitions, each state is better than the last, but the transition is painful. To alleviate the pain of the transition, sometimes we need to slow it down. The tough part is figuring out how much drag to apply so that it slows but doesn't halt.
hyperbovine 10y ago
> We repeatedly automated the majority of jobs on the planet every few decades and we saw the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity for the majority of humans in all of history. A lot of that wealth was obtained by unsustainably extracting our planet's natural resources. The past 100 years have been good, relatively speaking, but we did it in part by mortgaging our descendents' futures for many generations to come.
spenczar5 10y ago
"Subsistence farming" is not an accurate description of the European world before the industrial revolution. Farmers worked cash crops like wool, made plans years in advance, and there were substantial markets. See for example Christopher Dyer, "Making a Living in the Middle Ages" (2009) [1]: > "In managing the earth, vegetation and animals, the first priority of medieval men and women was to produce food, but they also expected to receive the benefits of their work in the foreseeable future, so the practised (to use the modern term) 'sustainable' agriculture. They planned for the same land to yield crops regularly, and the appreciated that well-managed resources renewed themselves. They anticipated the changeability of the seasons and the harvests, and hoped that their farming methods would allow them to survive in a year of unusual weather, for example by planting a variety of crops. At no time or place within our period can they be described as 'subsistence farmers' [emphasis added], in the sense that they ate only food that they had grown, or that they produced solely for their own consumption needs. They always expected that their land would yield a surplus, whether for the benefit of the state, the church or their lords, or for exchange for goods and services which they could not obtain from their own land. Now, I'm not going to pretend that the industrial revolution was obviously bad for most people, but to say it was obviously good is wrong too. It's a complex thing, and it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial economy than an agrarian one. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=82zXFn-EDisC https://books.google.com/books?id=82zXFn-EDisC
- greedo 10y ago
  "it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial economy than an agrarian one." Plague, famine, et al, sure sounds happier and healthier than compared to modern (First World) living. Even if you look back at hunter-gatherer societies where it's been claimed that leisure time was substantially greater than today, things like infant mortality make that seem like hell. I take these type of historical deconstructions with a large grain of salt; it used to be the idea of the Noble Savage, now it's moving on to medieval times.
  - spenczar5 10y ago
    I agree: modern life is better than ancient life, in general, for the reasons you describe. But that's not the two choices I was putting forward, which are an industrial economy or an agrarian one. Those changes in infant mortality, for example, are largely due to better hygiene around births and in handling infants. Wash your hands and boil your water; you can still be in an agrarian economy and do this.
mempko 10y ago
I would argue it's because of the scientific revolution, not the free market. Science is what got us all the great stuff. Why? Because even the Soviet Union, which was not market based had huge advances in industry and science. To say this is because of the free market, when most technology development is heavily government funded, even in the USA is just plain wrong.

smallnamespace 10y ago

I agree with you, but just a reminder that the Industrial Revolution was also a time of mass civil unrest, war, nationalism, and the growth of revolutionary groups advocating the overthrow of the existing social and economic order (some of which succeeded, e.g. Leninist Russia). You could make a fairly strong argument that is was the very real threat of Communist revolution in Western Europe (e.g. Germany in the 1930s, or Italy and France post-WW2) that forced governments to adopt socialist programs that moderated many of the excesses of the market, or in the US, the massive government investment in the middle class as well as draconian anti-left measures that prevented a similar threat. We've so far ended up in a somewhat decent place, but if history is any measure, we're going to have a rocky next few decades if technology does end up destroying or transforming demand for labor. People generally don't go quietly when their livelihoods or place in the social order are threatened.

maverick_iceman 10y ago
War and civil unrest has been extremely common throughout the world long before the industrial revolution. If anything war and violence have declined since the industrial revolution started (read Steven Pinker's Why Violence Declined). So I don't see how you can blame the industrial revolution for any residual unrest.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  Absolutely, but the sort of violence in preindustrial societies tended to be predictable and chronic (like tribal conflicts), whereas the industrial revolution enables total war, genocide, nuclear war, and other industrialized, sudden forms of human butchery.

simias 10y ago

Just to be clear I wasn't arguing against mass automation, at this point it's pretty much unstoppable from my point of view (and good for us software engineers). But we still haven't figured out how to deal with the changes that automation brings. And as always, it's the weakest that suffers the most. >The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan. Obviously, which is why I think it's a good idea to have a few regulations in place so that we, as a society, might figure out our plan and how to make the transition a little less painful for those who have to suffer the consequences. Not that you argued against regulations in the first place but from your comments I assumed you and pm90 were of the libertarian kind.

BurningFrog 10y ago
> But we still haven't figured out how to deal with the changes that automation brings I'll repeat the point: We have 250 years of experience of jobs disappearing to automation. The counterintuitive result is an enormously increased living standard for regular people. It's hard to compute by how much, but economists who try come up with a factor of 20x to 30x.
- rboyd 10y ago
  Why would a 250 trendline to still hold relevance after the introduction of the transistor and the network? I don't think modern society is in any way ready to reoptimize for the accelerating displacement that robotics and ai bring.
  - jethro_tell 10y ago
    We've had automation of physical tasks for a long time. Automation of mental tasks is a whole different ball game. People who think we're seeing more of the same game have no idea. You can't compare a machine being stronger/faster than a person to a machine being smarter than a person. It's not the same thing, and we aren't ready for it, partly just because people don't recognize the difference between the two.

st3v3r 10y ago

Because it's not the same? People moved from subsistence farming to factory work because there were jobs, and they didn't require a whole lot of specialized skill or training to do. Now those factory jobs are going away, and there isn't anything really taking it's place. There was a graph not to long ago that showed the most common job in each state. In a huge swath of them, that job was "Truck Driver". What're those people going to do to put food on the table or a roof over their family's head when those jobs are automated away?

jdreaver 10y ago
My point is it's never the same. No two technological advances are the same. We should be celebrating the fact that labor-saving tech is freeing us from mundane jobs. The goods produced by those jobs will be cheaper for everyone. Technological progress always brings jobs that require more skill, yet somehow over the last two centuries we have always had room for unskilled workers. Now, I'm not some heartless jerk who doesn't recognize that the short-term effects of job loss on unskilled workers. It is certainly a hard problem, but I'm still not convinced that we will have some epic labor shortage because all unskilled jobs will vanish too quickly.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  What does it matter that the goods are cheaper if you don't have a job to provide income to purchase said goods? And while labor-saving tech is, overall a good thing, there are lots of people still counting on those mundane jobs to put food on the table. And so far, no one is willing to think of what happens to them, or prepare for when those jobs go away. And if we don't do that, if we rely on "the market" to do the right thing, we will see that epic labor shortage which leads to the dystopian future.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    You realize that you could have made the same argument over the past 200 years? "Who'll buy all the farm produce when there are no fRm workers left?"

xapata 10y ago

If market shifts are state transitions, each state is better than the last, but the transition is painful. To alleviate the pain of the transition, sometimes we need to slow it down. The tough part is figuring out how much drag to apply so that it slows but doesn't halt.

hyperbovine 10y ago

> We repeatedly automated the majority of jobs on the planet every few decades and we saw the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity for the majority of humans in all of history. A lot of that wealth was obtained by unsustainably extracting our planet's natural resources. The past 100 years have been good, relatively speaking, but we did it in part by mortgaging our descendents' futures for many generations to come.

spenczar5 10y ago

"Subsistence farming" is not an accurate description of the European world before the industrial revolution. Farmers worked cash crops like wool, made plans years in advance, and there were substantial markets. See for example Christopher Dyer, "Making a Living in the Middle Ages" (2009) [1]: > "In managing the earth, vegetation and animals, the first priority of medieval men and women was to produce food, but they also expected to receive the benefits of their work in the foreseeable future, so the practised (to use the modern term) 'sustainable' agriculture. They planned for the same land to yield crops regularly, and the appreciated that well-managed resources renewed themselves. They anticipated the changeability of the seasons and the harvests, and hoped that their farming methods would allow them to survive in a year of unusual weather, for example by planting a variety of crops. At no time or place within our period can they be described as 'subsistence farmers' [emphasis added], in the sense that they ate only food that they had grown, or that they produced solely for their own consumption needs. They always expected that their land would yield a surplus, whether for the benefit of the state, the church or their lords, or for exchange for goods and services which they could not obtain from their own land. Now, I'm not going to pretend that the industrial revolution was obviously bad for most people, but to say it was obviously good is wrong too. It's a complex thing, and it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial economy than an agrarian one. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=82zXFn-EDisC https://books.google.com/books?id=82zXFn-EDisC

greedo 10y ago
"it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial economy than an agrarian one." Plague, famine, et al, sure sounds happier and healthier than compared to modern (First World) living. Even if you look back at hunter-gatherer societies where it's been claimed that leisure time was substantially greater than today, things like infant mortality make that seem like hell. I take these type of historical deconstructions with a large grain of salt; it used to be the idea of the Noble Savage, now it's moving on to medieval times.
- spenczar5 10y ago
  I agree: modern life is better than ancient life, in general, for the reasons you describe. But that's not the two choices I was putting forward, which are an industrial economy or an agrarian one. Those changes in infant mortality, for example, are largely due to better hygiene around births and in handling infants. Wash your hands and boil your water; you can still be in an agrarian economy and do this.

mempko 10y ago

I would argue it's because of the scientific revolution, not the free market. Science is what got us all the great stuff. Why? Because even the Soviet Union, which was not market based had huge advances in industry and science. To say this is because of the free market, when most technology development is heavily government funded, even in the USA is just plain wrong.