27 ms·

The "robot economy" has certainly failed so far. People are working more than ever and it's a travesty.

by erokar 7y ago

nielsole 7y ago
Leisure time is definitely not on an all time low.
- chii 7y ago
  The leisure time of the rich hasn't been higher in history!
  - jsnider3 7y ago
    Yes, the poor could solve all of their problem if only they had the good sense to be rich.
  - cronix 7y ago
    How does that affect you, besides jealousy?
krapp 7y ago
It's succeeding brilliantly. The purpose of automation is not, and has never been, to free people from work to pursue lives of leisure and intellectual stimulation. Its purpose is to concentrate the wealth created from labor into the hands of the ownership class without having to lose any of that wealth through hiring and compensating a human workforce. When the number of jobs available to the labor pool is reduced by automation, the market value of human labor goes down, but the amount of work humans are required to do to survive remains the same, or often it increases to take advantage of the efficiencies create by automation. Obviously, people will tend to wind up either unemployed, because there are fewer jobs, or working harder for less money, because their time is worth less. This isn't a failure of the system, this is the system working as intended.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Marx said the same thing and made his predictions accordingly 170 years ago, and they all failed to accurately portray the future.
  - petra 7y ago
    That was kind of true, until the existence of the communist USSR, and the great depression and it's results(among them WW2), made the ruling class in Europe/US pay more attention to workers. Do we need to pass through that kind of trouble in order to pay attention ?
  - scj 7y ago
    Da Vinci's predictions of a helicopter weren't looking too good 170 years ago either. The history of flight in general is a great story of old dreams becoming reality. And the dream has a simple origin, we knew birds could fly, so why couldn't humans? The Industrial Revolution posed a similar question, if machines can do some kinds of work, why can't they do every kind of work? A cynic would ask, what happens to the workers when there's no work? But I suspect the scarier question is, what happens when there's not enough work for everyone to be employed? And modern transportation creates another question of what happens when the remaining work is happening elsewhere?
ymarcn 7y ago
1. Advances in technology allow people to offer news services and new technologies that previously had not existed (automation fallacy/luddite fallacy) Eg: invention of the cotton gin paved the way to modern retail clothing industry. 2. After a new technology is invented, people who do the work the old way continue until it's no longer feasible. 3. When it becomes infeasible, they have to find other lines of work, rely on family and friends, or some combination thereof. We'll call this displacement. 4. Here are 2 ways to measure displacement: speed* (time to render old work infeasible) and size (number of displaced people). 5. Speculation: the time after something like the cotton gin is invented, displaced workers increase. But over all it's speed* is slower. 6. Speculation: increasing centralization has increased the scale at which automating solutions displace people. Other advances in technology possibly increase the number of innovations. Advances in logistics and information increases their speed*. 7. Speculation: The automation fallacy may apply, but there are still an increasing number of displaced workers. So that the nature of this scale is nonlinear. It increases drastically with centralization, speed, and generalizability.
- petra 7y ago
  >> Advances in technology allow people to offer news services and new technologies that previously had not existed That's the real interesting question. What will they be ? Some i can see: - more machines -> more machine maintenance and setup. But it'll be under the guidance of machines(AR, AI), So it won't require expertise, it would only require a medium or low amount of "good hands" skills. So the pay won't be good. - i would have said more marketing/selling, but given the amount of marketing and tiny niches that exist today, i'm not sure that's the case. And in any case AI will be better than us at that. If there would be more money( a big if, maybe we're heading for a different equilibrium): - more money -> more goods being bought -> more jobs on the manufacturing/retail/supply-chain which mostly will be machine maintenance etc. - more money -> more human based services being bought(basically selling good interpersonal skills, and care). - more money -> more/better healthcare - more money -> more travel, hospitality ? Anybody got other ideas?
  - otakucode 7y ago
    I am not certain what evidence you could point to to suggest that any of the things you suggest is done with more money ever actually happens. We have very concrete real evidence that all of that 'more money' goes into financial services companies, and all gains go back into the financial services industry. Companies hire workers when they need more money, not when they have an excess. Workers generate profit for companies, they're not a sink. Once those companies can purchase robots rather than workers, if it's profitable they will do that of course (and I would rather be starving to death in the street than doing a job that a cheap machine could be doing better, I've seen some people suggest we reserve some low skill jobs for humans and I think that sounds like the worst and cruelest torture imaginable). The gains they make from those robots will not be used to hire new workers, it would obviously be better spent purchasing new robots and if that would serve to reduce demand for their products from oversaturating the market, they will send the money to the financial services industry. Every choice has positives and negatives, however. Robots are good at some things, and bad at others. This could lead to an interesting clash. Robots, modular manufacturing, etc is very good at producing large numbers of identical copies of a product. There is no guarantee that society will continue to value this over production of a wide variety instead. If every production run is in numbers of dozens rather than millions, the advantages of automation start to falter. It's also important not to underestimate the power of human brain flaws. One of the flaws of the human brain is 'essentialism'. It's a complicated concept, but boils down to people might see robot-produced goods as not as 'rich' as human-produced goods, even when they are identical. Essentialism is the belief that an objects history is somehow attached to it. And if society decides that an object which has a human hand in it is far more valuable than a 'soulless' robot-produced good... whoops. That could seriously limit what products robots are actually able to bring value to. Human sense of value is what rules the economy, not objective value. There were many tradeoffs made back when production centralized into factories and big companies. All of those tradeoffs are up for renegotiation, and those who simply assume the choices made 100+ years ago are going to stand will be, I think, sorely disappointed.
simonh 7y ago
The problem is that we all need a place to live, want it to be nice and there is a limited supply of real estate. In the UK anyway, a large amount of our free income is devoted to bidding as much as we can afford for nice houses. Since everyone is bidding For the same pool of housing, we end up working as long as we can to out compete each other. We’re doing it to ourselves.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  We have done it to ourselves. Women enter the workplace, up go house prices. Financial deregulation, up go house prices. Low interest rates, up go house prices. Restrictive planning regulations, up go house prices. QE, up go house prices. Help to buy, up go house prices. It seems we are addicted to it.
  - jroro93jdj 7y ago
    Profits are up! Inequality is up! I mean that those two sentences, repeated over and over in the news weekly, don’t make the masses stop and think is a sign that the media machine is doing its job.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      About 50% of the equities market is owned by households and mutual funds.
- newguy1234 7y ago
  True but I would say the bigger problem is strict anti-building regulations in these areas where demand is high. Why aren't we building 20+ story tall buildings and massive underground structures?
- skybrian 7y ago
  Many people move to the most expensive cities in pursuit of jobs. This seems like a problem with load balancing? We need better incentives to encourage large organizations to expand in smaller cities with room to grow, while discouraging job growth in larger cities, and then people will move to less expensive places for the jobs.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
I'm not sure that's true, I watched a presentation by Jeffrey Sachs a while back that showed working hours have been decreasing for a long time across the developed world. I suspect what has happened is that change hasn't been spread out evenly. We spend more time in education so start work later. We retire earlier either through choice or otherwise. Hourly workers tend to work less than they would like and salaried workers work more.
otakucode 7y ago
What perspective are you viewing it from? The perspective of the worker is not the one that thus far funds or initiates any robot-driven initiatives, so I'm not sure why the effect on them would be used to judge success. For those who did fund and initiate the move toward robotics, it has been extremely successful, driving large amounts of money away directly into the hands of executives and shareholders (who are primarily financial services companies). As far as whether the moves will be undone or whether they will cease to be increased going forward, it's that perspective that it is necessary to take. One factor that so many analysts across the spectrum fail to account for is something that I think is going to lead to a great surprise for a lot of people. All of this technology, all of the data platforms, robots, etc.... it's CHEAP. Everyone focuses so closely on how these technologies will affect the factory floor, the centralized gigaproduction facility, they completely miss the fact that the distributed back yard shed operation can outcompete them. It doesn't have the overhead and the limitations of those centralized factories. Advancements in distribution, shipping, and logistics are available to everyone for a pittance. Services like Uber at their heart provide nothing but some server space for some software. That 'server space' can have its necessity disappear into the ether with distributed computing platforms simply aggregating the compute of its users. Not something currently regularly done, but there is no technical impediment to such a thing. And software like that has a tendency to just pop out of nowhere some weekend and change the landscape immediately. The software part could be handled like any FOSS project. Uber is a center in a system that doesn't need a center. (I'm not saying centers don't have advantages, I am saying that their presence is not an iron clad 100% absolute necessity for the system to work.) At the same time companies have been abandoning every bit of value they ever offered to workers since the 1980s, welching on pensions they tricked people into working for them with, adopting wage stagnation so that workers have to jump ship every few years to remain solvent, etc... technology has been making it such that those displaced workers could pretty easily outcompete the companies that ejected them. The companies are still restrained by Baby Boomer execs who refuse to leave and refuse to abandon the management practices drilled into them in relation to manufacturing and retail business. They're blind to the outrageous overhead and inefficiencies of their offices and practices because, as far as they see it, 'this is how it has always been done.' It is impossible to predict when any of these things will come home to roost. It is also nearly impossible to explain just how large of a change we are in for. It is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution which created central factories in the first place. That led to urban centers exploding in population. It changed how we built houses. It changed the moral norms of society. It changed the food we ate. It changed how we married. It changed family structure. It is not much of an exaggeration to say it changed everything. And now it's fundamental tenets (that production must be centralized, that distribution networks must be built, that large numbers of relatively low education physical laborers capable of extended periods of mindless repetitive actions are necessary, etc) no longer hold. It will probably take a long time. And it will unfortunately probably come with a great deal of conflict and bloodshed. That's just based on how history has gone in the past with changes of this scale.
esotericn 7y ago
In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken. Nothing else is an issue at all. Everything else is essentially trivially cheap (excepting cases of disability). A year's worth of food costs about as much as 1 month's rent on a small flat in London. (Many people increase their food expenditure, but the basics are doable for that). Even in the northern towns 100K for a house is fairly standard. That's a ridiculous amount of money - a home does not take 5 man-years to produce any more. The only thing anyone works for is rent, indirect rent (e.g. paying 5 quid a pint because of the pub's rent and the pub workers' rent and so on), their mortgage, whatever.
- maxsilver 7y ago
  > In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken. Yes, and this seems true in basically all the similar-ish countries too. (It's 100% broken in the the vast majority of the US and Canada. It looks like it's mostly broken in Australia and New Zealand too)
  - CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
    Wouldn’t it be true for any capitalistic economy. Owners will extract as much rent as the market will bear, and employees will pay as little as the market accepts. It seems only natural that those two forces would converge on having rent correlate strongly with wages
    - esotericn 7y ago
      It's more empirical than that I think. The situation in SE England in which 95%+ of those under, say, age 30 or so, will never own a home (and are currently in little rooms sharing with others if they're not partnered off) is not something that is a result of some sort of economic formula. Individuals still have to decide that it's better than their alternatives (e.g. lower cost towns, rural living, staying with parents, emigrating, ...). Beyond that there's also political action.
meruru 7y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours Are they?
TomMckenny 7y ago
Because everyone who does not own robots is competing with them.
thephyber 7y ago
Hyperbole. Developed economies don’t have a “996” policy like China does, and even China will dial that back once the average standard of living rises sufficiently. The US had ridiculously harsh labor conditions in the first “gilded age” (long work hours, difficult and dangerous labor tasks, company towns that paid in scrips and charged high rates for company accommodations, etc). “The robot economy” allowed each WhatsApp developer the power to supply 18million users each with their service[1]. It’s not that we are working more to accomplish the same amount of work. Total productivity of the economy compounds as innovation and specialization increase. Also, from what I can tell, those who are highly productive seem to have phenotypes that drive them to constantly work at a high level (curiosity, grit, drive, etc). Those who don’t have these things are likely to be unable to find decent jobs, keeping them forever working for stagnant hourly wages while resentlful that they can’t find a rung to a ladder that leads higher. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...

The "robot economy" has certainly failed so far. People are working more than ever and it's a travesty.

by erokar 7y ago

The "robot economy" has certainly failed so far. People are working more than ever and it's a travesty.

nielsole 7y ago

Leisure time is definitely not on an all time low.

chii 7y ago
The leisure time of the rich hasn't been higher in history!
- jsnider3 7y ago
  Yes, the poor could solve all of their problem if only they had the good sense to be rich.
- cronix 7y ago
  How does that affect you, besides jealousy?

krapp 7y ago

It's succeeding brilliantly. The purpose of automation is not, and has never been, to free people from work to pursue lives of leisure and intellectual stimulation. Its purpose is to concentrate the wealth created from labor into the hands of the ownership class without having to lose any of that wealth through hiring and compensating a human workforce. When the number of jobs available to the labor pool is reduced by automation, the market value of human labor goes down, but the amount of work humans are required to do to survive remains the same, or often it increases to take advantage of the efficiencies create by automation. Obviously, people will tend to wind up either unemployed, because there are fewer jobs, or working harder for less money, because their time is worth less. This isn't a failure of the system, this is the system working as intended.

conanbatt 7y ago
Marx said the same thing and made his predictions accordingly 170 years ago, and they all failed to accurately portray the future.
- petra 7y ago
  That was kind of true, until the existence of the communist USSR, and the great depression and it's results(among them WW2), made the ruling class in Europe/US pay more attention to workers. Do we need to pass through that kind of trouble in order to pay attention ?
- scj 7y ago
  Da Vinci's predictions of a helicopter weren't looking too good 170 years ago either. The history of flight in general is a great story of old dreams becoming reality. And the dream has a simple origin, we knew birds could fly, so why couldn't humans? The Industrial Revolution posed a similar question, if machines can do some kinds of work, why can't they do every kind of work? A cynic would ask, what happens to the workers when there's no work? But I suspect the scarier question is, what happens when there's not enough work for everyone to be employed? And modern transportation creates another question of what happens when the remaining work is happening elsewhere?

ymarcn 7y ago

1. Advances in technology allow people to offer news services and new technologies that previously had not existed (automation fallacy/luddite fallacy) Eg: invention of the cotton gin paved the way to modern retail clothing industry. 2. After a new technology is invented, people who do the work the old way continue until it's no longer feasible. 3. When it becomes infeasible, they have to find other lines of work, rely on family and friends, or some combination thereof. We'll call this displacement. 4. Here are 2 ways to measure displacement: speed* (time to render old work infeasible) and size (number of displaced people). 5. Speculation: the time after something like the cotton gin is invented, displaced workers increase. But over all it's speed* is slower. 6. Speculation: increasing centralization has increased the scale at which automating solutions displace people. Other advances in technology possibly increase the number of innovations. Advances in logistics and information increases their speed*. 7. Speculation: The automation fallacy may apply, but there are still an increasing number of displaced workers. So that the nature of this scale is nonlinear. It increases drastically with centralization, speed, and generalizability.

petra 7y ago
>> Advances in technology allow people to offer news services and new technologies that previously had not existed That's the real interesting question. What will they be ? Some i can see: - more machines -> more machine maintenance and setup. But it'll be under the guidance of machines(AR, AI), So it won't require expertise, it would only require a medium or low amount of "good hands" skills. So the pay won't be good. - i would have said more marketing/selling, but given the amount of marketing and tiny niches that exist today, i'm not sure that's the case. And in any case AI will be better than us at that. If there would be more money( a big if, maybe we're heading for a different equilibrium): - more money -> more goods being bought -> more jobs on the manufacturing/retail/supply-chain which mostly will be machine maintenance etc. - more money -> more human based services being bought(basically selling good interpersonal skills, and care). - more money -> more/better healthcare - more money -> more travel, hospitality ? Anybody got other ideas?
- otakucode 7y ago
  I am not certain what evidence you could point to to suggest that any of the things you suggest is done with more money ever actually happens. We have very concrete real evidence that all of that 'more money' goes into financial services companies, and all gains go back into the financial services industry. Companies hire workers when they need more money, not when they have an excess. Workers generate profit for companies, they're not a sink. Once those companies can purchase robots rather than workers, if it's profitable they will do that of course (and I would rather be starving to death in the street than doing a job that a cheap machine could be doing better, I've seen some people suggest we reserve some low skill jobs for humans and I think that sounds like the worst and cruelest torture imaginable). The gains they make from those robots will not be used to hire new workers, it would obviously be better spent purchasing new robots and if that would serve to reduce demand for their products from oversaturating the market, they will send the money to the financial services industry. Every choice has positives and negatives, however. Robots are good at some things, and bad at others. This could lead to an interesting clash. Robots, modular manufacturing, etc is very good at producing large numbers of identical copies of a product. There is no guarantee that society will continue to value this over production of a wide variety instead. If every production run is in numbers of dozens rather than millions, the advantages of automation start to falter. It's also important not to underestimate the power of human brain flaws. One of the flaws of the human brain is 'essentialism'. It's a complicated concept, but boils down to people might see robot-produced goods as not as 'rich' as human-produced goods, even when they are identical. Essentialism is the belief that an objects history is somehow attached to it. And if society decides that an object which has a human hand in it is far more valuable than a 'soulless' robot-produced good... whoops. That could seriously limit what products robots are actually able to bring value to. Human sense of value is what rules the economy, not objective value. There were many tradeoffs made back when production centralized into factories and big companies. All of those tradeoffs are up for renegotiation, and those who simply assume the choices made 100+ years ago are going to stand will be, I think, sorely disappointed.

simonh 7y ago

The problem is that we all need a place to live, want it to be nice and there is a limited supply of real estate. In the UK anyway, a large amount of our free income is devoted to bidding as much as we can afford for nice houses. Since everyone is bidding For the same pool of housing, we end up working as long as we can to out compete each other. We’re doing it to ourselves.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
We have done it to ourselves. Women enter the workplace, up go house prices. Financial deregulation, up go house prices. Low interest rates, up go house prices. Restrictive planning regulations, up go house prices. QE, up go house prices. Help to buy, up go house prices. It seems we are addicted to it.
- jroro93jdj 7y ago
  Profits are up! Inequality is up! I mean that those two sentences, repeated over and over in the news weekly, don’t make the masses stop and think is a sign that the media machine is doing its job.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    About 50% of the equities market is owned by households and mutual funds.
newguy1234 7y ago
True but I would say the bigger problem is strict anti-building regulations in these areas where demand is high. Why aren't we building 20+ story tall buildings and massive underground structures?
skybrian 7y ago
Many people move to the most expensive cities in pursuit of jobs. This seems like a problem with load balancing? We need better incentives to encourage large organizations to expand in smaller cities with room to grow, while discouraging job growth in larger cities, and then people will move to less expensive places for the jobs.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

I'm not sure that's true, I watched a presentation by Jeffrey Sachs a while back that showed working hours have been decreasing for a long time across the developed world. I suspect what has happened is that change hasn't been spread out evenly. We spend more time in education so start work later. We retire earlier either through choice or otherwise. Hourly workers tend to work less than they would like and salaried workers work more.

otakucode 7y ago

What perspective are you viewing it from? The perspective of the worker is not the one that thus far funds or initiates any robot-driven initiatives, so I'm not sure why the effect on them would be used to judge success. For those who did fund and initiate the move toward robotics, it has been extremely successful, driving large amounts of money away directly into the hands of executives and shareholders (who are primarily financial services companies). As far as whether the moves will be undone or whether they will cease to be increased going forward, it's that perspective that it is necessary to take. One factor that so many analysts across the spectrum fail to account for is something that I think is going to lead to a great surprise for a lot of people. All of this technology, all of the data platforms, robots, etc.... it's CHEAP. Everyone focuses so closely on how these technologies will affect the factory floor, the centralized gigaproduction facility, they completely miss the fact that the distributed back yard shed operation can outcompete them. It doesn't have the overhead and the limitations of those centralized factories. Advancements in distribution, shipping, and logistics are available to everyone for a pittance. Services like Uber at their heart provide nothing but some server space for some software. That 'server space' can have its necessity disappear into the ether with distributed computing platforms simply aggregating the compute of its users. Not something currently regularly done, but there is no technical impediment to such a thing. And software like that has a tendency to just pop out of nowhere some weekend and change the landscape immediately. The software part could be handled like any FOSS project. Uber is a center in a system that doesn't need a center. (I'm not saying centers don't have advantages, I am saying that their presence is not an iron clad 100% absolute necessity for the system to work.) At the same time companies have been abandoning every bit of value they ever offered to workers since the 1980s, welching on pensions they tricked people into working for them with, adopting wage stagnation so that workers have to jump ship every few years to remain solvent, etc... technology has been making it such that those displaced workers could pretty easily outcompete the companies that ejected them. The companies are still restrained by Baby Boomer execs who refuse to leave and refuse to abandon the management practices drilled into them in relation to manufacturing and retail business. They're blind to the outrageous overhead and inefficiencies of their offices and practices because, as far as they see it, 'this is how it has always been done.' It is impossible to predict when any of these things will come home to roost. It is also nearly impossible to explain just how large of a change we are in for. It is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution which created central factories in the first place. That led to urban centers exploding in population. It changed how we built houses. It changed the moral norms of society. It changed the food we ate. It changed how we married. It changed family structure. It is not much of an exaggeration to say it changed everything. And now it's fundamental tenets (that production must be centralized, that distribution networks must be built, that large numbers of relatively low education physical laborers capable of extended periods of mindless repetitive actions are necessary, etc) no longer hold. It will probably take a long time. And it will unfortunately probably come with a great deal of conflict and bloodshed. That's just based on how history has gone in the past with changes of this scale.

esotericn 7y ago

In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken. Nothing else is an issue at all. Everything else is essentially trivially cheap (excepting cases of disability). A year's worth of food costs about as much as 1 month's rent on a small flat in London. (Many people increase their food expenditure, but the basics are doable for that). Even in the northern towns 100K for a house is fairly standard. That's a ridiculous amount of money - a home does not take 5 man-years to produce any more. The only thing anyone works for is rent, indirect rent (e.g. paying 5 quid a pint because of the pub's rent and the pub workers' rent and so on), their mortgage, whatever.

maxsilver 7y ago
> In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken. Yes, and this seems true in basically all the similar-ish countries too. (It's 100% broken in the the vast majority of the US and Canada. It looks like it's mostly broken in Australia and New Zealand too)
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  Wouldn’t it be true for any capitalistic economy. Owners will extract as much rent as the market will bear, and employees will pay as little as the market accepts. It seems only natural that those two forces would converge on having rent correlate strongly with wages
  - esotericn 7y ago
    It's more empirical than that I think. The situation in SE England in which 95%+ of those under, say, age 30 or so, will never own a home (and are currently in little rooms sharing with others if they're not partnered off) is not something that is a result of some sort of economic formula. Individuals still have to decide that it's better than their alternatives (e.g. lower cost towns, rural living, staying with parents, emigrating, ...). Beyond that there's also political action.

meruru 7y ago

https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours Are they?

TomMckenny 7y ago

Because everyone who does not own robots is competing with them.

thephyber 7y ago

Hyperbole. Developed economies don’t have a “996” policy like China does, and even China will dial that back once the average standard of living rises sufficiently. The US had ridiculously harsh labor conditions in the first “gilded age” (long work hours, difficult and dangerous labor tasks, company towns that paid in scrips and charged high rates for company accommodations, etc). “The robot economy” allowed each WhatsApp developer the power to supply 18million users each with their service[1]. It’s not that we are working more to accomplish the same amount of work. Total productivity of the economy compounds as innovation and specialization increase. Also, from what I can tell, those who are highly productive seem to have phenotypes that drive them to constantly work at a high level (curiosity, grit, drive, etc). Those who don’t have these things are likely to be unable to find decent jobs, keeping them forever working for stagnant hourly wages while resentlful that they can’t find a rung to a ladder that leads higher. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...