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"...The question is, assuming that this trend toward the networked automation of factories continues — and there is little evidence to suggest that it won’t — w

"...The question is, assuming that this trend toward the networked automation of factories continues — and there is little evidence to suggest that it won’t — what happens next?..." This is getting rather tiresome. Let's see. My guess is that "Things that can't be created by automation" become more scarce, hence more rare. That means their price goes up, demand increases, and more folks start making that stuff. Why do rich people buy expensive designer cars? After all, once the model T came out, the problem of people wanting to go from one place to the other was solved.

wavefunction 10y ago
So we're all going to support ourselves as Lamborghini mechanics then? I hope there's enough Lamborghinis to go around then...
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Based on what I can tell, most of us are going to be self-promoting, angry, victimized doomsday scenario peddlers. That gig has been around since long before Malthus and no matter how many folks are doing it, there never seems to be a lack of demand.
  - Jedd 10y ago
    I truly can't work out from this and your earlier comments if you're trolling, being intentionally obtuse, believe you're immune by nature of inherited wealth or sanguine expectations around your employment, or simply don't understand the nature and scale of the problems that are being described here.
- Swizec 10y ago
  But if you can charge, say, $50,000/year to keep a Lamborghini top notch ... how many customers do you really need? > The Murcielago will run you about $2000 for an oil change, $4000 for plugs and the best part $12000 for an E-Gear Clutch. The Gallardo on the other hand is more docile and similar to the Ferrari 360 Modena at just $400 for an oil change, $2000 for plugs and finally about $3500 for an E-Gear clutch. The Lamborghini maintenance ranges heavily based on the line you select and should not be taken lightly as the cost of new transmission could cost you $50,000 if a replacement is needed and lets not even talk about the engine failing. If a new transmission costs $50,000 in parts alone. How much can you charge to put it in? And let's not forget that polishing these cars can cost thousands of dollars per shine. Relevant link: http://www.secretentourage.com/lifestyle/autos/cost-of-ownership-of-an-exotic-car/ http://www.secretentourage.com/lifestyle/autos/cost-of-owner... http://www.esotericdetail.com/detailing-services/ferrari-lamborghini-and-exotics/ http://www.esotericdetail.com/detailing-services/ferrari-lam...
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    That's fine, as long as there's one Lamborghini per mechanic. We can sustain a society off of that.
  - nradov 10y ago
    The technicians get very little of that $50K.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    Why on Earth would an oil change cost $2000, or even $400? Are these stealership prices or something? What keeps you from just changing the oil yourself in your garage? Surely a Lamborghini uses some standard oil like 5W-30 and some standard filter; it's not like they make their own oil and filters. And why would plugs cost $4000? Again, they surely don't make their own spark plugs, but instead get them from a vendor like NGK or Bosch, and are probably the exact same plugs used in various BMWs or something, which you can buy anywhere. Specialty parts, made specifically for that model (or for Lamborghinis in general), are of course going to be expensive because of limited supply, but the oil change thing really doesn't make sense, that just sounds like price-gouging.
ThomPete 10y ago
Why should things that can't be created by automation become more scarce hence more rare? A cleaning lady is more likely to be a job than a radiologist for longer time as cleaning is actually using almost the entire human spectrum of abilities while radiologist primarily utilizes two. That doesn't make cleaning more scarce or rare and more expensive it just means there is going to be more people who fight to get the job.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  People want things they can't have. The economy is not driven by humans logically picking just the basic resources they need for survival. It was never like that.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    What does that have to do with automation though? It's like that today. Thats not the discussion that we are having around automation.
    - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
      The only thing that automation does is decrease the cost of things you can have towards zero. Everything else is the same. It used to be that fresh fruits were rare, sometimes even priceless. A huge number of people were required to grow, tend, harvest, transport, and sell fruit, especially in the off-months. That's all automated now. So the price of fresh fruit is tending towards zero. All of those people are not that doing that any more. Those people are still working, just not in jobs that are as heavily automated. There will always be something you cannot automate. Because you can't, it will be expensive. Because it is expensive, people will want it. It is not logical, but it is the way our species operates. So people do stuff, other people like it, then it's automated, then they find other stuff to do that's harder to automate. If your thesis is that there is some sort of universal automation coming? Maybe 300-500 years out, when the Great Singularity occurs (because these two events are the same thing). But no time soon. I will grant you that we currently have no freaking idea of what the economy in 2050 will look like. I believe this is the cool part of being mortal in our age -- things are always so goddamned different between when you're born and when you die.
Gargoyle 10y ago
I need to make a bot that automates the posting of this type of response every time the subject of automation comes up. Imagine the labor savings!
jdietrich 10y ago
That is a very glib answer. The economic effects of automation are a very serious issue. A wage economy based on veblen goods is not a good outcome for the vast majority of people. The invention of photography vastly reduced the demand for painters, first by allowing a photographer to produce vast numbers of portraits quickly and cheaply, then by allowing consumers to make their own photographs. People still make paintings for money, but there is a power-law distribution of the rewards - the vast majority are amateurs or barely scrape a living, while a tiny handful of artists sell paintings for tens of millions of dollars. There is a growing economic consensus that automation will lead to substantial polarization of the labour market. The jobs most threatened by automation are the skilled but routine jobs that characterise most of the middle class. Some of the displaced factory workers, truck drivers and clerical workers might find a good career as an artisanal baker or a professional YouTuber; I suspect that many more will end up falling into poorly paid and precarious work at the bottom of the labour market, or dropping out of the labour market entirely. Ultimately, we're talking about people's lives and livelihoods. It's simply not good enough to assume that everything will be OK, to hand-wave away serious doubts being raised by sensible and informed people. There is a strong possibility that the wave of populism spreading across the western world is being stoked by increasing economic insecurity resulting from automation. We on HN are the people responsible for automation; it is incumbent on us to seriously examine the risks posed by it. If we are not prepared for these risks, the results could be catastrophic.
- calibration263 10y ago
  To use your example, portrait painting was essentially killed by photography. If you were a painter, or are trying to be a painter today, things don't look great. However what you haven't addressed is the impact of reducing the human labor cost/skill to producing portraits. Historically painting portraits were prohibitively expensive, likely most people never had a painting/portrait of themselves or their family. The introduction of photography enabled everyone to have photos of themselves, their families, their children growing up, their wedding. In terms of labour, we started doing things with photos that only the richest people could have afforded to do with paint. Just think of how many mall photography shops there used to be in the early 90s. In the long term we wound up with a higher quality of life by making something that used to be expensive accessible, while still maintaining a large number of jobs. Just not if you're a painter. tl;dr, automation is bad for the individual, but good for society.
coldtea 10y ago
>Let's see. My guess is that "Things that can't be created by automation" become more scarce, hence more rare. That means their price goes up, demand increases, and more folks start making that stuff. This assumes that: (1) jobs making "things that can't be created by automation" would be enough to replace jobs replaced by automation. (2)people whose jobs have been automated en masse will still have money to pay for that marginally useful scarce products (or consumption by the rich/upper classes will be enough to employ them). None of those two are safe bets. There's nothing magical about jobs, and no physical or other law that guarantees that humanity will forever, whatever the technology available, still have jobs for everybody. It's very much possible to have a world where only 5-10% of the population is required to perform the most manual/difficult to AI jobs and all the others are automated away. We basically have 2 historical instances where this didn't happen, and we extrapolate that this is some guarantee. But it's far from guaranteed. The industrial revolution turned most manual and farm jobs into factory jobs because early factories weren't automated enough by the technology of the time -- not because it was "inevitable". The service factor jobs that replaced most factory jobs when factories got more automated happened because we had the increase factory production, but no way to automate those (from accounting to burger flipping). If the majority of those get automated away from AI and software, there might be new jobs, but there's no guarantee for that. There might be some way (through a "New Deal" style effort to create various marginally useful jobs for humans), or a huge reduction in working hours, or there might be UBI, or there will be discontent and chaos and people who are more numerous than jobs.
nradov 10y ago
The vast majority of people are incapable of making physical objects of any value. Look around any local arts & crafts fair; most of the booths are filled with junk that I wouldn't take even if it was free. We're going to have to find a better solution.

wavefunction 10y ago

So we're all going to support ourselves as Lamborghini mechanics then? I hope there's enough Lamborghinis to go around then...

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Based on what I can tell, most of us are going to be self-promoting, angry, victimized doomsday scenario peddlers. That gig has been around since long before Malthus and no matter how many folks are doing it, there never seems to be a lack of demand.
- Jedd 10y ago
  I truly can't work out from this and your earlier comments if you're trolling, being intentionally obtuse, believe you're immune by nature of inherited wealth or sanguine expectations around your employment, or simply don't understand the nature and scale of the problems that are being described here.
Swizec 10y ago
But if you can charge, say, $50,000/year to keep a Lamborghini top notch ... how many customers do you really need? > The Murcielago will run you about $2000 for an oil change, $4000 for plugs and the best part $12000 for an E-Gear Clutch. The Gallardo on the other hand is more docile and similar to the Ferrari 360 Modena at just $400 for an oil change, $2000 for plugs and finally about $3500 for an E-Gear clutch. The Lamborghini maintenance ranges heavily based on the line you select and should not be taken lightly as the cost of new transmission could cost you $50,000 if a replacement is needed and lets not even talk about the engine failing. If a new transmission costs $50,000 in parts alone. How much can you charge to put it in? And let's not forget that polishing these cars can cost thousands of dollars per shine. Relevant link: http://www.secretentourage.com/lifestyle/autos/cost-of-ownership-of-an-exotic-car/ http://www.secretentourage.com/lifestyle/autos/cost-of-owner... http://www.esotericdetail.com/detailing-services/ferrari-lamborghini-and-exotics/ http://www.esotericdetail.com/detailing-services/ferrari-lam...
- wavefunction 10y ago
  That's fine, as long as there's one Lamborghini per mechanic. We can sustain a society off of that.
- nradov 10y ago
  The technicians get very little of that $50K.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  Why on Earth would an oil change cost $2000, or even $400? Are these stealership prices or something? What keeps you from just changing the oil yourself in your garage? Surely a Lamborghini uses some standard oil like 5W-30 and some standard filter; it's not like they make their own oil and filters. And why would plugs cost $4000? Again, they surely don't make their own spark plugs, but instead get them from a vendor like NGK or Bosch, and are probably the exact same plugs used in various BMWs or something, which you can buy anywhere. Specialty parts, made specifically for that model (or for Lamborghinis in general), are of course going to be expensive because of limited supply, but the oil change thing really doesn't make sense, that just sounds like price-gouging.

ThomPete 10y ago

Why should things that can't be created by automation become more scarce hence more rare? A cleaning lady is more likely to be a job than a radiologist for longer time as cleaning is actually using almost the entire human spectrum of abilities while radiologist primarily utilizes two. That doesn't make cleaning more scarce or rare and more expensive it just means there is going to be more people who fight to get the job.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
People want things they can't have. The economy is not driven by humans logically picking just the basic resources they need for survival. It was never like that.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  What does that have to do with automation though? It's like that today. Thats not the discussion that we are having around automation.
  - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    The only thing that automation does is decrease the cost of things you can have towards zero. Everything else is the same. It used to be that fresh fruits were rare, sometimes even priceless. A huge number of people were required to grow, tend, harvest, transport, and sell fruit, especially in the off-months. That's all automated now. So the price of fresh fruit is tending towards zero. All of those people are not that doing that any more. Those people are still working, just not in jobs that are as heavily automated. There will always be something you cannot automate. Because you can't, it will be expensive. Because it is expensive, people will want it. It is not logical, but it is the way our species operates. So people do stuff, other people like it, then it's automated, then they find other stuff to do that's harder to automate. If your thesis is that there is some sort of universal automation coming? Maybe 300-500 years out, when the Great Singularity occurs (because these two events are the same thing). But no time soon. I will grant you that we currently have no freaking idea of what the economy in 2050 will look like. I believe this is the cool part of being mortal in our age -- things are always so goddamned different between when you're born and when you die.

Gargoyle 10y ago

I need to make a bot that automates the posting of this type of response every time the subject of automation comes up. Imagine the labor savings!

jdietrich 10y ago

That is a very glib answer. The economic effects of automation are a very serious issue. A wage economy based on veblen goods is not a good outcome for the vast majority of people. The invention of photography vastly reduced the demand for painters, first by allowing a photographer to produce vast numbers of portraits quickly and cheaply, then by allowing consumers to make their own photographs. People still make paintings for money, but there is a power-law distribution of the rewards - the vast majority are amateurs or barely scrape a living, while a tiny handful of artists sell paintings for tens of millions of dollars. There is a growing economic consensus that automation will lead to substantial polarization of the labour market. The jobs most threatened by automation are the skilled but routine jobs that characterise most of the middle class. Some of the displaced factory workers, truck drivers and clerical workers might find a good career as an artisanal baker or a professional YouTuber; I suspect that many more will end up falling into poorly paid and precarious work at the bottom of the labour market, or dropping out of the labour market entirely. Ultimately, we're talking about people's lives and livelihoods. It's simply not good enough to assume that everything will be OK, to hand-wave away serious doubts being raised by sensible and informed people. There is a strong possibility that the wave of populism spreading across the western world is being stoked by increasing economic insecurity resulting from automation. We on HN are the people responsible for automation; it is incumbent on us to seriously examine the risks posed by it. If we are not prepared for these risks, the results could be catastrophic.

calibration263 10y ago
To use your example, portrait painting was essentially killed by photography. If you were a painter, or are trying to be a painter today, things don't look great. However what you haven't addressed is the impact of reducing the human labor cost/skill to producing portraits. Historically painting portraits were prohibitively expensive, likely most people never had a painting/portrait of themselves or their family. The introduction of photography enabled everyone to have photos of themselves, their families, their children growing up, their wedding. In terms of labour, we started doing things with photos that only the richest people could have afforded to do with paint. Just think of how many mall photography shops there used to be in the early 90s. In the long term we wound up with a higher quality of life by making something that used to be expensive accessible, while still maintaining a large number of jobs. Just not if you're a painter. tl;dr, automation is bad for the individual, but good for society.

coldtea 10y ago

>Let's see. My guess is that "Things that can't be created by automation" become more scarce, hence more rare. That means their price goes up, demand increases, and more folks start making that stuff. This assumes that: (1) jobs making "things that can't be created by automation" would be enough to replace jobs replaced by automation. (2)people whose jobs have been automated en masse will still have money to pay for that marginally useful scarce products (or consumption by the rich/upper classes will be enough to employ them). None of those two are safe bets. There's nothing magical about jobs, and no physical or other law that guarantees that humanity will forever, whatever the technology available, still have jobs for everybody. It's very much possible to have a world where only 5-10% of the population is required to perform the most manual/difficult to AI jobs and all the others are automated away. We basically have 2 historical instances where this didn't happen, and we extrapolate that this is some guarantee. But it's far from guaranteed. The industrial revolution turned most manual and farm jobs into factory jobs because early factories weren't automated enough by the technology of the time -- not because it was "inevitable". The service factor jobs that replaced most factory jobs when factories got more automated happened because we had the increase factory production, but no way to automate those (from accounting to burger flipping). If the majority of those get automated away from AI and software, there might be new jobs, but there's no guarantee for that. There might be some way (through a "New Deal" style effort to create various marginally useful jobs for humans), or a huge reduction in working hours, or there might be UBI, or there will be discontent and chaos and people who are more numerous than jobs.

nradov 10y ago

The vast majority of people are incapable of making physical objects of any value. Look around any local arts & crafts fair; most of the booths are filled with junk that I wouldn't take even if it was free. We're going to have to find a better solution.