5 ms·

It would be nice to break the link between work and survival. Because there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the future (automation, etc).

ekianjo 9y ago
> Because there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the future (automation, etc). Folks said the same thing before for every industrial revolution. I'd like to see more facts than religion on this matter.
- VikingCoder 9y ago
  Moore's Law was not a law, only a good fit of the data for a very long time. The ability of machines to replace people is advancing to points we've never seen before, and I don't think any of us can really predict what will happen.
  - notahacker 9y ago
    The ability of machines to replace people advanced to points we've never seen before in every other era either. And we got rid of whole other classes of jobs in the West for entirely different reasons like international trade (textile manufacturing) or culture (domestic servitude). What was persistently underestimated was people's willingness and ability to find new things which people wanted to pay for, many of them hitherto impossible without the ability to manufacture stuff at low cost, and many of them in areas which machines are still very bad at. Not being able to predict the future is a very strong argument against redesigning the welfare state to give more people money on the assumption that historic links between economic growth and the labour force are about to disappear.
    - VikingCoder 9y ago
      Sound logic. Except you're presuming that Moore's Law will last forever. How will you know when it's about to stop?
      - notahacker 9y ago
        The people assuming Moore's Law will last forever are the people who are making "today I made some radiologists redundant, tomorrow not many jobs in medicine" connections I'm arguing "as things get cheaper because fewer people were used to make it, you'd better have really good reasons to believe people won't just use the excess money to buy more stuff as we've always observed them do in the past". If there's one resource that seems to consistently fulfil Jevons' Paradox it's labour. We might have fewer radiologists instead of more X-ray scans in future, but I see little reason to believe that won't be offset by the need for highly trained people to calmly reassure them about other diagnostic tools that have only just been invented. Throw in a bit of Veblen "people with excess money actually really like paying people to do things for them in unnecessarily laborious ways to signal how wealthy they are". It's rooted in human psychology as well as a couple of hundred years of empirical observations. I rather think the burden of proof - especially when calling for drastic action - is on the people arguing this time it'll be different, and they're the ones reliant on projections of trend lines to try to argue that computers that do everything better than humans are [still] only a decade away.
        VikingCoder 9y ago
        "as things get cheaper because fewer people were used to make it" You're saying price drops when cost drops, and that's empirically not true. Price drops when demand drops, or when supply increases. When the cost drops, then the producer just gets more profit. And if they're wise, they buy or merge with their slightly less efficient competitors, because collusion is illegal, but no one is stopping M&A these days. And for necessary goods like food, water, shelter, clothing, it's not like the demand drops much over time, so the demand stays where it was (or grows with population.) Worker productivity is through the roof. That's automation. Real wages are going down. That's evidence. What happens when they keep dropping? "Nothing changes," is your answer?
        notahacker 9y ago
        As I said, it's the neo-Luddites saying "but if you project these country-specific short term trend lines forward indefinitely, we'll all be unemployed...". Whereas we've got 200 years of data confirming the basic logic that the relative prices of basic food and clothing get much cheaper as lower costs increase competitors' ability to supply, something I'm genuinely amazed you can argue doesn't happen. Sure, individual companies can prop up their monopoly profit margins through IP protection or M&A or positioning themselves as a luxury item, but only in the same sense that water can be forced, in certain circumstances, to flow uphill.
- lbrandy 9y ago
  > Folks said the same thing before for every industrial revolution. I'd like to see more facts than religion on this matter. I agree with you that the "jobs are running out" is an argument that requires evidence, given its history of being wrong, but there are good reasons to believe it's going to be true, eventually. To be clear "because it's never happened before" is -also- an argument that's always right, until its wrong. For example, if you look at the list of most widely held jobs that don't require a college degree and pay middle class salary. It's a rapidly dwindling list and has been declining for a long time. Of the ones that employ many of people, there's basically one left: truck driver. That's the reason that the rise of automated automobiles is coinciding with this conversation.
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    I don't think that argument holds true for anything other than "automated-away factory worker." There is an increasing demand for most trade jobs like plumbers & electricians as boomers start to retire and fewer people are entering the trades. Someone's always going to have to be there to run wiring in a new building or hook up the gas line when you buy a new stove.
    - gremlinsinc 9y ago
      This is something a robot could eventually do, I don't see any reason a bot can't fix plumbing issues... It'll start out as a bot that goes in and sprays something on pipes to repair them, or goes into the drains itself and drills out muck to clear clogs, then the bots will show up via delivery drone and be able to do all that on their own without a plumber, and you just ship back when the issue is fixed...
- maxerickson 9y ago
  The US imported labor like a crazy country throughout its industrial revolution.
h1d 9y ago
You mean some just consume for nothing? Maybe if most works are replaced by machines.
fro 9y ago
Machines do steal jobs - the repetitive, manual labor jobs that humans do not want. They also increase efficiency and profits for companies, leading to lower costs for consumers and investments in new industries that may not have existed before.
- VikingCoder 9y ago
  Ha. I worked in Medical Imaging for a decade. I made it so that one Radiologist with my software could do the work of two Radiologists without my software. Radiologists are highly trained, highly specialized, and earn big, big bucks. And I was making machines that stole their jobs. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is at danger of automation helping replace their job.
VikingCoder 9y ago
Rant ahead, sorry.... I had this debate with people all the time, and it turns out I was wrong. There WILL be jobs. They were right about that, I believe. It's just that they won't pay enough to be able to provide for yourself. We have divisions of labor, because they work. But your ability to sit in an office, type on a computer, answer phone calls, and go to meetings, only translates into your ability to feed yourself, clothe yourself, have a living space, because of supply and demand. Those skills are in short enough supply right now, that they have enough value... to trade with the people who make your food, clothing, housing. But if you imagine that in the future, automation is going to make it so that smaller and smaller numbers of people are necessary to do your job (it's happening to Radiologists and Physicists, it can happen to anyone), then essentially there's far too many of you in the supply, so you won't be able to demand good wages. On the other hand, it's not like the demand for food, clothing, and housing will drop. And even though the COST to make food, clothing, and housing will drop, THAT'S NOT HOW THINGS ARE PRICED. They are priced by their scarcity. And the machines that make the food, clothing, and housing, are still going to be relatively expensive. (Lucky for the people who own them!) So the people who own the machines will have you over a barrel. You need what they can make, and you have nothing they want in exchange. Without Universal Basic Income, I think we'd have to resort to Socialism (literally, the government control of the means of production of basic needs like food, clothing, housing), in order to not have people starving in the streets. OR People will stop "dividing their labor," and they'll get good at taking care of themselves. Like the Amish. Farming. Sewing. Textiles. Chopping wood. I don't mean this sarcastically, there's nothing wrong with that kind of life. If you look at history, the Amish are very healthy in comparison to everyone else. Maybe they're more puritanical than any of us would accept, but their DIY, hands on, back to nature life isn't a crazy idea. But if we do have Universal Basic Income, I think people will find ways to keep busy, and to make some extra money for luxuries. Want to go to Disney World? Well, work in the record shop you like. Listen to tunes all day, discuss music with people with similar interests. You only earn about $2 an hour, but that's fine. It's all just gravy. Want to be a Radiologist? That's great - use your UBI to pay for college. Earn tons of money. Go to Disney World all the time. UBI + Progressive taxes just makes tons of sense to me. Don't tax me much when I'm getting started in my career. Tax the crap out of me when I'm figuring out whether I can afford 5 weeks or only 4 at Disney World each year.

ekianjo 9y ago

> Because there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the future (automation, etc). Folks said the same thing before for every industrial revolution. I'd like to see more facts than religion on this matter.

VikingCoder 9y ago
Moore's Law was not a law, only a good fit of the data for a very long time. The ability of machines to replace people is advancing to points we've never seen before, and I don't think any of us can really predict what will happen.
- notahacker 9y ago
  The ability of machines to replace people advanced to points we've never seen before in every other era either. And we got rid of whole other classes of jobs in the West for entirely different reasons like international trade (textile manufacturing) or culture (domestic servitude). What was persistently underestimated was people's willingness and ability to find new things which people wanted to pay for, many of them hitherto impossible without the ability to manufacture stuff at low cost, and many of them in areas which machines are still very bad at. Not being able to predict the future is a very strong argument against redesigning the welfare state to give more people money on the assumption that historic links between economic growth and the labour force are about to disappear.
  - VikingCoder 9y ago
    Sound logic. Except you're presuming that Moore's Law will last forever. How will you know when it's about to stop?
    - notahacker 9y ago
      The people assuming Moore's Law will last forever are the people who are making "today I made some radiologists redundant, tomorrow not many jobs in medicine" connections I'm arguing "as things get cheaper because fewer people were used to make it, you'd better have really good reasons to believe people won't just use the excess money to buy more stuff as we've always observed them do in the past". If there's one resource that seems to consistently fulfil Jevons' Paradox it's labour. We might have fewer radiologists instead of more X-ray scans in future, but I see little reason to believe that won't be offset by the need for highly trained people to calmly reassure them about other diagnostic tools that have only just been invented. Throw in a bit of Veblen "people with excess money actually really like paying people to do things for them in unnecessarily laborious ways to signal how wealthy they are". It's rooted in human psychology as well as a couple of hundred years of empirical observations. I rather think the burden of proof - especially when calling for drastic action - is on the people arguing this time it'll be different, and they're the ones reliant on projections of trend lines to try to argue that computers that do everything better than humans are [still] only a decade away.
      - VikingCoder 9y ago
        "as things get cheaper because fewer people were used to make it" You're saying price drops when cost drops, and that's empirically not true. Price drops when demand drops, or when supply increases. When the cost drops, then the producer just gets more profit. And if they're wise, they buy or merge with their slightly less efficient competitors, because collusion is illegal, but no one is stopping M&A these days. And for necessary goods like food, water, shelter, clothing, it's not like the demand drops much over time, so the demand stays where it was (or grows with population.) Worker productivity is through the roof. That's automation. Real wages are going down. That's evidence. What happens when they keep dropping? "Nothing changes," is your answer?
        notahacker 9y ago
        As I said, it's the neo-Luddites saying "but if you project these country-specific short term trend lines forward indefinitely, we'll all be unemployed...". Whereas we've got 200 years of data confirming the basic logic that the relative prices of basic food and clothing get much cheaper as lower costs increase competitors' ability to supply, something I'm genuinely amazed you can argue doesn't happen. Sure, individual companies can prop up their monopoly profit margins through IP protection or M&A or positioning themselves as a luxury item, but only in the same sense that water can be forced, in certain circumstances, to flow uphill.
lbrandy 9y ago
> Folks said the same thing before for every industrial revolution. I'd like to see more facts than religion on this matter. I agree with you that the "jobs are running out" is an argument that requires evidence, given its history of being wrong, but there are good reasons to believe it's going to be true, eventually. To be clear "because it's never happened before" is -also- an argument that's always right, until its wrong. For example, if you look at the list of most widely held jobs that don't require a college degree and pay middle class salary. It's a rapidly dwindling list and has been declining for a long time. Of the ones that employ many of people, there's basically one left: truck driver. That's the reason that the rise of automated automobiles is coinciding with this conversation.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  I don't think that argument holds true for anything other than "automated-away factory worker." There is an increasing demand for most trade jobs like plumbers & electricians as boomers start to retire and fewer people are entering the trades. Someone's always going to have to be there to run wiring in a new building or hook up the gas line when you buy a new stove.
  - gremlinsinc 9y ago
    This is something a robot could eventually do, I don't see any reason a bot can't fix plumbing issues... It'll start out as a bot that goes in and sprays something on pipes to repair them, or goes into the drains itself and drills out muck to clear clogs, then the bots will show up via delivery drone and be able to do all that on their own without a plumber, and you just ship back when the issue is fixed...
maxerickson 9y ago
The US imported labor like a crazy country throughout its industrial revolution.

h1d 9y ago

You mean some just consume for nothing? Maybe if most works are replaced by machines.

fro 9y ago

Machines do steal jobs - the repetitive, manual labor jobs that humans do not want. They also increase efficiency and profits for companies, leading to lower costs for consumers and investments in new industries that may not have existed before.

VikingCoder 9y ago
Ha. I worked in Medical Imaging for a decade. I made it so that one Radiologist with my software could do the work of two Radiologists without my software. Radiologists are highly trained, highly specialized, and earn big, big bucks. And I was making machines that stole their jobs. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is at danger of automation helping replace their job.

VikingCoder 9y ago

Rant ahead, sorry.... I had this debate with people all the time, and it turns out I was wrong. There WILL be jobs. They were right about that, I believe. It's just that they won't pay enough to be able to provide for yourself. We have divisions of labor, because they work. But your ability to sit in an office, type on a computer, answer phone calls, and go to meetings, only translates into your ability to feed yourself, clothe yourself, have a living space, because of supply and demand. Those skills are in short enough supply right now, that they have enough value... to trade with the people who make your food, clothing, housing. But if you imagine that in the future, automation is going to make it so that smaller and smaller numbers of people are necessary to do your job (it's happening to Radiologists and Physicists, it can happen to anyone), then essentially there's far too many of you in the supply, so you won't be able to demand good wages. On the other hand, it's not like the demand for food, clothing, and housing will drop. And even though the COST to make food, clothing, and housing will drop, THAT'S NOT HOW THINGS ARE PRICED. They are priced by their scarcity. And the machines that make the food, clothing, and housing, are still going to be relatively expensive. (Lucky for the people who own them!) So the people who own the machines will have you over a barrel. You need what they can make, and you have nothing they want in exchange. Without Universal Basic Income, I think we'd have to resort to Socialism (literally, the government control of the means of production of basic needs like food, clothing, housing), in order to not have people starving in the streets. OR People will stop "dividing their labor," and they'll get good at taking care of themselves. Like the Amish. Farming. Sewing. Textiles. Chopping wood. I don't mean this sarcastically, there's nothing wrong with that kind of life. If you look at history, the Amish are very healthy in comparison to everyone else. Maybe they're more puritanical than any of us would accept, but their DIY, hands on, back to nature life isn't a crazy idea. But if we do have Universal Basic Income, I think people will find ways to keep busy, and to make some extra money for luxuries. Want to go to Disney World? Well, work in the record shop you like. Listen to tunes all day, discuss music with people with similar interests. You only earn about $2 an hour, but that's fine. It's all just gravy. Want to be a Radiologist? That's great - use your UBI to pay for college. Earn tons of money. Go to Disney World all the time. UBI + Progressive taxes just makes tons of sense to me. Don't tax me much when I'm getting started in my career. Tax the crap out of me when I'm figuring out whether I can afford 5 weeks or only 4 at Disney World each year.