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I cannot fathom at all why anyone, other than top 10% or so whose wealth depends on everyone else's labor, is fighting automation. Or wants to keep a job. I wou
by njharman 10y ago
I cannot fathom at all why anyone, other than top 10% or so whose wealth depends on everyone else's labor, is fighting automation. Or wants to keep a job. I would gladly let machines do the work so I can play fetch with my dog all day.
Instead of converting productivity into less work we turned it into more profit. That's a bad trade.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoWhen the machine does your work, and the bosses keep your wage for themselves. What are you going to eat, or indeed feed your dog, how well you past for it without a wage?
- davidivadavid 10y agoWhy wouldn't playing fetch with his (and other people's dogs) not become a perfectly viable job in a world where consumer goods are dirt cheap and human labor relatively scarcer?
- Chris2048 10y agoWhy would labor be cheap?
- davidivadavid 10y agoI don't know. The premise was precisely that labor would become more expensive. The idea is that if we can automate "everything" (i.e. everything that can be automated), then we'll be left with human-only services. Since humans are scarce, and there will be rising demand from the income effect, people can still perfectly live off exchanging services. I'm not sure that makes macroeconomic sense, so if someone wants to clarify misunderstandings for me, I'd be happy to hear it.
- PeterisP 10y agoWell, what makes you think that humans are scarce? Unemployment is a thing already. For example, you can take a look at what e.g. waiters or Walmart greeters earn right now - that's a price set by supply&demand. Automation moving more people to such jobs means the supply of labor would increase, driving down the price for services. Assuming the jobless people will have less income than if they worked, and more time to do stuff themselves (some of the services industry is essentially something that you'd prefer to make yourself but you're paying to save yourself some time) demand for service jobs would decrease, again driving down the price for services lower than it is now.
- davidivadavid 10y ago> Automation moving more people to such jobs I don't think the set of possible jobs is limited to either existing jobs, or in particular waiters and Walmart greeters. That's kind of the point. We invent new jobs all the time. Won't we come up with jobs that cannot be automated, or that we'd rather be performed by humans? > Assuming the jobless people will have less income than if they worked Well, that's more of a tautology than an assumption, and fails to engage with the scenario highlighted above. The point is that people will get other "jobs." (I put it in quotation marks because I'm pretty sure that people will get paid to do things we'd never thought of as "jobs" at some point). Of course, S&D still works the same way. But human desire is pretty much infinite, and we can always come up with new jobs and new markets. The idea that all of them will be desirably automateable seems unproven to me.
- PeterisP 10y agoWhat's preventing those new jobs from being done right now? We already have all these unlimited needs and infinite desires right now, but we aren't willing to pay a minimum wage for them at the moment or we would be doing so. Also, there clearly are all kinds of personal services possible which are bought by a few of the rich but not en masse - there is not a demand for them, and for the average person probably cannot be, i.e. if a service is nice but people would value 1 man-hour spent on it as 0.99 man-hours of their time, then that service can ever be in demand only for a wealthier-than-average minority. Yes, it's possible that some new habits will create some new professions in time, however, for the short term (e.g. the next 5 years) such new occupations won't create millions of jobs (e.g. because unless right now millions of people would be preparing for them, the people won't be ready so soon) while automation will put millions of people out of these jobs. Who knows to what equilibrium it will come out eventually, but in the short term the labor supply will be dominating over demand and the price (and perceived value) of labor will continue to fall.
- Chris2048 10y agoMain issue are the laws wrt land ownership etc, e.g. the old "means of production". Except I don't consider the products that allow production (factory, machines etc) to be the means, so much as access to those products on the market, lines of credit, land ownership on which to put a factory etc. production needs to be achievable for anyone, otherwise you have an effective monopoly. Means of production should be considered akin to a basic utility.
- njharman 10y agoquote my self since you didn't see it. > Instead of converting productivity into less work we turned it into more profit. That's a bad trade.