9 ms·

The First Time America Freaked Out Over Automation

73 points by robg 9y ago

rrggrr 9y ago
> that most any job that can be given to a machine will be, and that machines’ capabilities are improving by the day. Automation tax. If employment, payroll and healthcare taxes are justified for the employment of people, than why shouldn't there be taxes levied on automation? Given the impact automation has on employment and wages, isn't a countervailing tax on automation a necessity?
- neon_electro 9y ago
  How do you tax automation? How do you ensure you don't stifle its development? Shouldn't we be focusing on distributing the fruits of automation as widely as possible?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    A VAT.
    - rrggrr 9y ago
      Correct, a Value Added Tax. It may be necessary to levy additional taxes on high employment businesses hurt by automation (eg. Transportation). The responsible thing to do would be to tightly earmark the proceeds, and to have the taxes sunset, requiring a 2/3 majority to renew, after 10 years.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    You wouldn't be taxing automation but rather the output of automation.
  - eduren 9y ago
    >Shouldn't we be focusing on distributing the fruits of automation as widely as possible? Is that not something that taxation would provide?
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > How do you tax automation? You start by just taxing income equally, rather than having extra-heavy taxes on labor income like we do now. Right now, we tax-prefer automation and replacement of labor with capital.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I think tax policy could be defined in a way that favors employment. Right now it's almost the opposite.
  - wvenable 9y ago
    Why would society want a tax policy that favors human labor over machine labor? We want the machines to take over but we all want to be sipping Mai Tais on the beach while it happens.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      Possibly because people with more time than responsibilities to fill that time often end up stirring things up, especially when in close proximity to each other. Just look at college. Society does place a premium on stability, so too much of this might not be a good thing.
      - and0 9y ago
        A lot of students are pretty busy. And what are these horrors of college dorm life you're speaking of? Aside from campus rape, of course, but that doesn't seem to be a result of idleness.
        kbenson 9y ago
        Protests, activism, etc. I'm not saying it's bad, just that a lot of calls for change happen when people are less occupied by putting food on the sable for themselves and their family. Change may be good or bad, but a lot of change, all at once, often has very negative short term consequences for most people, and there's no guarantee that with these negative consequences it's a better path than a slower change. Civil wars are examples of fairly negative consequences of massive change in a short time. I imagine there's likely a certain level of population that are activists under which a society is fairly stable, and over which makes society fairly unstable (possibly altered by the vehemence of belief). Personally, I would rather live in a more stable society with a good amount of activism for change (hopefully for the better) than in a society tearing itself apart.
- reustle 9y ago
  How do you decide what is and isn't automation? Are the small factories of today filled with automation? Is my local apple orchards conveyer system to move apples from one side of the building to the other automation?
ThomPete 9y ago
I find it rather troubling how many people have issues with seeing the difference between automation in the 50ies which was about replacing manual labour and then AI which is about replacing the mind. Unless humans have some extra secret advantage besides our intellect I have a hard time understanding why so many people just can't see that this is a very different situation than they had back then. Since 2009 95% of all jobs created in the US were temp jobs. Bush expanding the definition of what constitutes a job and Obama didn't change that. So we are dealing with highly inflated job numbers not including the number of people you simply don't count as available for the job market anymore. The states deficit is at record highs because we have funded all this with borrowed money either from other countries who buy our currency or the future through quantitative easing. Yet somehow most people think everything is just another luddite fallacy being replayed. New sustainable jobs aren't created, the number of entrepreneurs is actually going down and the economy move from labour heavy to capital intense industries. And our politicians are being advised by economists who treat technology as an externality. Somethings gotta give.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  > Since 2009 95% of all jobs in the US were temp jobs [citation needed]
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created-since-2005-are-temporary/ https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created... http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/most-jobs-created-2005-are-temporary-or-unsteady-n693631 http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/most-jobs-created-2...
    - InitialLastName 9y ago
      I'm going to need you to change that to "95% of all NEW jobs", then, because that's what those sources say.
      - 9y ago
Havoc 9y ago
Don't think this is accurate. I feel here "this time it's different" does apply. Previous automation waves focused on taking a mechanical task a human was doing and making it faster by mechanical means. Compare that to the modern AIs outperforming highly trained doctors in diagnosis. Fundamentally different - instead of optimising a physical task we're replacing the need for a thinking human. It's also worth noting that the response to previous waves was a shift to knowledge work. Now that is being threatened too. Short of moving to basic income I don't see where humans are going to go next.
- danbolt 9y ago
  I feel the same way with the "this time it's different" bit, but I want to play the devil's advocate. While knowledge tasks are different than mechanical ones, you could argue that they're both "tasks" that are being "done" and require thinking in some way, but just more (or different) thinking is involved this time. I don't know if machines could automate things like ingenuity, although at the same time I don't know if the demand for ingenuity is large enough for people to have a stable job.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    You'd be wrong IMO: https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664 https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664
    - krapht 9y ago
      There's human ingenuity in applying computer optimization techniques to a given problem. Actually using finite or boundary element analysis software requires a great deal of expertise in order not to get garbage results out. Strong AI is not coming anytime soon. People will still be necessary.
      - ThomPete 9y ago
        Thats really not true. Humans don't know how it works. Just that it does.
Clubber 9y ago
By using the term "freaked out," it implies that automation isn't anything to worry about. The difference between now and then is the scope and the speed.
jtwebman 9y ago
This was in no way the first. It was a big deal back in the late 1800's and early 1900's when things switched from horse powered to steam powered as well. As well as when cars replaced horses. They said it was going to kill industries, which it did. Yet we all moved on. You can back forever with this. Things change, and some people embrace it and some never do.
Theodores 9y ago
A lot of freaking out is about the A.I. automations of the future that can think like us, talk like us and know everything. However, I am doing regular computer automation with regular code that works with normal data. In the process transforming a company from working 1990's style 'personal computing' to where the web server 'does all that for you'. Many thousand of 'if' statements later I have automated many things have changed, three teams working from same-but-different spreadsheets now just use the same data in a proper database. If anyone enters the data wrongly then the computer corrects it and probably had it right before someone changed it. The thing is that some quite 'simple' office jobs are quite complicated to do in code, debug and test. But then you do it 'the computer way' so it can check thousands of records or millions of them to see if that email address has been used before. A mere human would not know that or be able to just casually check a million or so previous sales orders etc. in a couple of seconds. So with these 'computer special' ways of doing things, the finished automation goes beyond what is possible by hand, or if attempted by hand the time taken would just not be available. The human role has been deskilled and the computer code is already approaching 'self awareness' even though it is just a lot of if statements with no Google brain A.I. in sight. A lot of thought about information architecture is needed for this, more like applying the Toyota Way to 1's and 0's with changes to business processes and new properly thought out databases of sorts built to support this new 'web' way of working. Essentially lots of data entry work is taken out of all departments in the company with the web replacing documents as we know them. If you ream through a company taking the data entry out of a person's job here and there, this is usually a help because it does free these people to be more productive and do the things that they wanted to do and joined the company for, which is rarely data entry. They can progress within their career and use new tools that are part of a better company wide team thing, enabled by the web. Companies that do not automate like this cannot compete on price with those companies that do get 'web' ways of working properly automated. The companies that don't fully embrace the web tend to have 'the web' as a hybrid 'typing pool' of sorts, a cost, they don't get it, but it happens. In this future the company that automates its processes just with if statements, cron jobs, a sprinkling of SQL in the reporting and everything going through https:// https://, this company can scale. If all the customers decide to return product for a refund at the same time (e.g. Note7) then this can be handled without a bottleneck in back office processes and resultant customer dissatisfaction about money not returned etc. In this way automation is crucial for existential threats that could ruin a company's reputation. This scale-able company is able to take up the market occupied by non-automated rival companies, not visa-versa. 'If' statements are very cheap when written and tested, sending data is also very cheap. It is this simple, non-AI automation that is the thing people need to fear. Despite how many hours someone works or time served or how high up the hierarchy they are, there is the risk that half of their job could go, to be replaced by some helper module code that is a mere handful of kilobytes. Relatively speaking the Google grade AI self-driving car stuff that replaces rocket surgeons is not the thing to be scared of, it is the insidious 'if' statements of regular code and how the winners will all have to use 'web' ways of working.
good_vibes 9y ago
Winter is coming. Robots are exponentially different from that generation of machines.
- majewsky 9y ago
  Winter, you say? Because my money is on at least another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter before the real breakthroughs. ;)
pg_bot 9y ago
This article nails the point on why people should embrace automation instead of fear it. To give a HN themed example, how many people made a living telling you what was in a picture 20 years ago? If you told someone that you make a living by telling people that there is a horse in a picture they would have looked at you like you were crazy. Yet today hundreds of people make their living through image recognition. This is one example of hundreds, it just turns out that predicting the future is a bit more difficult than people realize. If you believe otherwise I suggest that you should go into investing or starting your own startup.
flukus 9y ago
Something always missed int this debate is the limits to human consumption. The average person today lives like a wealthy one 100 years ago, but a wealthy person today doesn't live too much differently to 100 years ago. What we've reached now is a point where we can't consume anymore. I can't eat more food, I don't have time to watch more entertainment, etc. Unless we consume more there will be no new jobs created to fill the void left by the steady march of automation.
b1daly 9y ago
The worrying over the effects of extreme AI always strike as being a peculiar quirk of human psychology. It's a hypothetical worry, about a hypothetical problem, when there are actual problems happening now, that could be addressed. For example, there is a the phenomenon of increasing income disparity in developed economies. It seems like the solutions to this problem should be much easier than the challenges of creating advanced AI, thereby displacing even more workers, and then solving the problems created by the displacement of workers. Given that corporate profits have been pretty good, changes to the tax and regulatory environment that would encourage modest shifts of those profits from owners and managers, to labor, would go a long way towards relieving real economic stress for individuals and communities. There have been virulent, and absurd, political movements that have supported this system that is shifting the surplus of the economy ever more to the "haves." I'm not going to pretend I understand the sociology behind this, but there is some low hanging fruit I can see. One is the increasing influence of money in our electoral system. Citizens United didn't have to decided the way it did. Humans chose this. We could choose different. We are starting to see cracks in the alliances that make up both the Democratic and Republican party. Perhaps there is an opportunity for more a modicum of more progressive ideas to take hold. As some other posters have alluded to, one possible solution to the economic displacement of automation would be to increase cooperative ownership of the "means of production." In my town, the local food coop is incredibly successful, and has just opened a third store. They had around $50 million in sales last year, with a small profit. I think the managerial philosophy is to aim for a modest profit, and to provide a living for the workers, food for the community, and social capital to the neighborhoods they operate in. This is a complicated, and mysterious, area of human endeavor. But attempting the social engineering to make the US economy more "progressive," as well as mm more productive would go a long way. I am hoping, for example, the abject failure of the Republicans to craft a plausible health care plan might break the spell this malignant political party commands over a disturbingly large segment of the voters. For all of their manifest flaws, I think the Democrats have never succumbed to the kind of blatant "know-nothing-ism" of the Republicans, with their repugnant "guns, God, and gays" messaging. Again, not easy, but doable. And this is all happening right now. The singularity is an imaginary scenario, st this point!

73 points by robg 9y ago

> that most any job that can be given to a machine will be, and that machines’ capabilities are improving by the day. Automation tax. If employment, payroll and healthcare taxes are justified for the employment of people, than why shouldn't there be taxes levied on automation? Given the impact automation has on employment and wages, isn't a countervailing tax on automation a necessity?

neon_electro 9y ago
How do you tax automation? How do you ensure you don't stifle its development? Shouldn't we be focusing on distributing the fruits of automation as widely as possible?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  A VAT.
  - rrggrr 9y ago
    Correct, a Value Added Tax. It may be necessary to levy additional taxes on high employment businesses hurt by automation (eg. Transportation). The responsible thing to do would be to tightly earmark the proceeds, and to have the taxes sunset, requiring a 2/3 majority to renew, after 10 years.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- ThomPete 9y ago
  You wouldn't be taxing automation but rather the output of automation.
- eduren 9y ago
  >Shouldn't we be focusing on distributing the fruits of automation as widely as possible? Is that not something that taxation would provide?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > How do you tax automation? You start by just taxing income equally, rather than having extra-heavy taxes on labor income like we do now. Right now, we tax-prefer automation and replacement of labor with capital.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I think tax policy could be defined in a way that favors employment. Right now it's almost the opposite.
- wvenable 9y ago
  Why would society want a tax policy that favors human labor over machine labor? We want the machines to take over but we all want to be sipping Mai Tais on the beach while it happens.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Possibly because people with more time than responsibilities to fill that time often end up stirring things up, especially when in close proximity to each other. Just look at college. Society does place a premium on stability, so too much of this might not be a good thing.
    - and0 9y ago
      A lot of students are pretty busy. And what are these horrors of college dorm life you're speaking of? Aside from campus rape, of course, but that doesn't seem to be a result of idleness.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        Protests, activism, etc. I'm not saying it's bad, just that a lot of calls for change happen when people are less occupied by putting food on the sable for themselves and their family. Change may be good or bad, but a lot of change, all at once, often has very negative short term consequences for most people, and there's no guarantee that with these negative consequences it's a better path than a slower change. Civil wars are examples of fairly negative consequences of massive change in a short time. I imagine there's likely a certain level of population that are activists under which a society is fairly stable, and over which makes society fairly unstable (possibly altered by the vehemence of belief). Personally, I would rather live in a more stable society with a good amount of activism for change (hopefully for the better) than in a society tearing itself apart.
reustle 9y ago
How do you decide what is and isn't automation? Are the small factories of today filled with automation? Is my local apple orchards conveyer system to move apples from one side of the building to the other automation?

ThomPete 9y ago

I find it rather troubling how many people have issues with seeing the difference between automation in the 50ies which was about replacing manual labour and then AI which is about replacing the mind. Unless humans have some extra secret advantage besides our intellect I have a hard time understanding why so many people just can't see that this is a very different situation than they had back then. Since 2009 95% of all jobs created in the US were temp jobs. Bush expanding the definition of what constitutes a job and Obama didn't change that. So we are dealing with highly inflated job numbers not including the number of people you simply don't count as available for the job market anymore. The states deficit is at record highs because we have funded all this with borrowed money either from other countries who buy our currency or the future through quantitative easing. Yet somehow most people think everything is just another luddite fallacy being replayed. New sustainable jobs aren't created, the number of entrepreneurs is actually going down and the economy move from labour heavy to capital intense industries. And our politicians are being advised by economists who treat technology as an externality. Somethings gotta give.

InitialLastName 9y ago
> Since 2009 95% of all jobs in the US were temp jobs [citation needed]
- ThomPete 9y ago
  https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created-since-2005-are-temporary/ https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created... http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/most-jobs-created-2005-are-temporary-or-unsteady-n693631 http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/most-jobs-created-2...
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    I'm going to need you to change that to "95% of all NEW jobs", then, because that's what those sources say.
    - 9y ago

Havoc 9y ago

Don't think this is accurate. I feel here "this time it's different" does apply. Previous automation waves focused on taking a mechanical task a human was doing and making it faster by mechanical means. Compare that to the modern AIs outperforming highly trained doctors in diagnosis. Fundamentally different - instead of optimising a physical task we're replacing the need for a thinking human. It's also worth noting that the response to previous waves was a shift to knowledge work. Now that is being threatened too. Short of moving to basic income I don't see where humans are going to go next.

danbolt 9y ago
I feel the same way with the "this time it's different" bit, but I want to play the devil's advocate. While knowledge tasks are different than mechanical ones, you could argue that they're both "tasks" that are being "done" and require thinking in some way, but just more (or different) thinking is involved this time. I don't know if machines could automate things like ingenuity, although at the same time I don't know if the demand for ingenuity is large enough for people to have a stable job.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  You'd be wrong IMO: https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664 https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664
  - krapht 9y ago
    There's human ingenuity in applying computer optimization techniques to a given problem. Actually using finite or boundary element analysis software requires a great deal of expertise in order not to get garbage results out. Strong AI is not coming anytime soon. People will still be necessary.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      Thats really not true. Humans don't know how it works. Just that it does.

Clubber 9y ago

By using the term "freaked out," it implies that automation isn't anything to worry about. The difference between now and then is the scope and the speed.

jtwebman 9y ago

This was in no way the first. It was a big deal back in the late 1800's and early 1900's when things switched from horse powered to steam powered as well. As well as when cars replaced horses. They said it was going to kill industries, which it did. Yet we all moved on. You can back forever with this. Things change, and some people embrace it and some never do.

Theodores 9y ago

A lot of freaking out is about the A.I. automations of the future that can think like us, talk like us and know everything. However, I am doing regular computer automation with regular code that works with normal data. In the process transforming a company from working 1990's style 'personal computing' to where the web server 'does all that for you'. Many thousand of 'if' statements later I have automated many things have changed, three teams working from same-but-different spreadsheets now just use the same data in a proper database. If anyone enters the data wrongly then the computer corrects it and probably had it right before someone changed it. The thing is that some quite 'simple' office jobs are quite complicated to do in code, debug and test. But then you do it 'the computer way' so it can check thousands of records or millions of them to see if that email address has been used before. A mere human would not know that or be able to just casually check a million or so previous sales orders etc. in a couple of seconds. So with these 'computer special' ways of doing things, the finished automation goes beyond what is possible by hand, or if attempted by hand the time taken would just not be available. The human role has been deskilled and the computer code is already approaching 'self awareness' even though it is just a lot of if statements with no Google brain A.I. in sight. A lot of thought about information architecture is needed for this, more like applying the Toyota Way to 1's and 0's with changes to business processes and new properly thought out databases of sorts built to support this new 'web' way of working. Essentially lots of data entry work is taken out of all departments in the company with the web replacing documents as we know them. If you ream through a company taking the data entry out of a person's job here and there, this is usually a help because it does free these people to be more productive and do the things that they wanted to do and joined the company for, which is rarely data entry. They can progress within their career and use new tools that are part of a better company wide team thing, enabled by the web. Companies that do not automate like this cannot compete on price with those companies that do get 'web' ways of working properly automated. The companies that don't fully embrace the web tend to have 'the web' as a hybrid 'typing pool' of sorts, a cost, they don't get it, but it happens. In this future the company that automates its processes just with if statements, cron jobs, a sprinkling of SQL in the reporting and everything going through https:// https://, this company can scale. If all the customers decide to return product for a refund at the same time (e.g. Note7) then this can be handled without a bottleneck in back office processes and resultant customer dissatisfaction about money not returned etc. In this way automation is crucial for existential threats that could ruin a company's reputation. This scale-able company is able to take up the market occupied by non-automated rival companies, not visa-versa. 'If' statements are very cheap when written and tested, sending data is also very cheap. It is this simple, non-AI automation that is the thing people need to fear. Despite how many hours someone works or time served or how high up the hierarchy they are, there is the risk that half of their job could go, to be replaced by some helper module code that is a mere handful of kilobytes. Relatively speaking the Google grade AI self-driving car stuff that replaces rocket surgeons is not the thing to be scared of, it is the insidious 'if' statements of regular code and how the winners will all have to use 'web' ways of working.

good_vibes 9y ago

Winter is coming. Robots are exponentially different from that generation of machines.

majewsky 9y ago
Winter, you say? Because my money is on at least another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter before the real breakthroughs. ;)

pg_bot 9y ago

This article nails the point on why people should embrace automation instead of fear it. To give a HN themed example, how many people made a living telling you what was in a picture 20 years ago? If you told someone that you make a living by telling people that there is a horse in a picture they would have looked at you like you were crazy. Yet today hundreds of people make their living through image recognition. This is one example of hundreds, it just turns out that predicting the future is a bit more difficult than people realize. If you believe otherwise I suggest that you should go into investing or starting your own startup.

flukus 9y ago

Something always missed int this debate is the limits to human consumption. The average person today lives like a wealthy one 100 years ago, but a wealthy person today doesn't live too much differently to 100 years ago. What we've reached now is a point where we can't consume anymore. I can't eat more food, I don't have time to watch more entertainment, etc. Unless we consume more there will be no new jobs created to fill the void left by the steady march of automation.

b1daly 9y ago

The worrying over the effects of extreme AI always strike as being a peculiar quirk of human psychology. It's a hypothetical worry, about a hypothetical problem, when there are actual problems happening now, that could be addressed. For example, there is a the phenomenon of increasing income disparity in developed economies. It seems like the solutions to this problem should be much easier than the challenges of creating advanced AI, thereby displacing even more workers, and then solving the problems created by the displacement of workers. Given that corporate profits have been pretty good, changes to the tax and regulatory environment that would encourage modest shifts of those profits from owners and managers, to labor, would go a long way towards relieving real economic stress for individuals and communities. There have been virulent, and absurd, political movements that have supported this system that is shifting the surplus of the economy ever more to the "haves." I'm not going to pretend I understand the sociology behind this, but there is some low hanging fruit I can see. One is the increasing influence of money in our electoral system. Citizens United didn't have to decided the way it did. Humans chose this. We could choose different. We are starting to see cracks in the alliances that make up both the Democratic and Republican party. Perhaps there is an opportunity for more a modicum of more progressive ideas to take hold. As some other posters have alluded to, one possible solution to the economic displacement of automation would be to increase cooperative ownership of the "means of production." In my town, the local food coop is incredibly successful, and has just opened a third store. They had around $50 million in sales last year, with a small profit. I think the managerial philosophy is to aim for a modest profit, and to provide a living for the workers, food for the community, and social capital to the neighborhoods they operate in. This is a complicated, and mysterious, area of human endeavor. But attempting the social engineering to make the US economy more "progressive," as well as mm more productive would go a long way. I am hoping, for example, the abject failure of the Republicans to craft a plausible health care plan might break the spell this malignant political party commands over a disturbingly large segment of the voters. For all of their manifest flaws, I think the Democrats have never succumbed to the kind of blatant "know-nothing-ism" of the Republicans, with their repugnant "guns, God, and gays" messaging. Again, not easy, but doable. And this is all happening right now. The singularity is an imaginary scenario, st this point!