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>The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that. Somebody

>The bankrupt notion that somehow 'were funding those people' is meaningless. The factories pour out the goods. Nobody's slaving away to 'fund' that. Somebody has to create, build, and maintain those factories. Someone else has to manage the output of those factories and distribute it. Someone else needs to work to secure raw materials for the factory. Age you can't produce everything in factories. You don't have a factory that grows food for example. Programming, especially web development is a great analogy here. You have tools that do almost all the things you would want a website to do. Why do we need web developers at all then? Because it turns out that connecting everything and fine tuning it for your specific needs is quite difficult.

nitrogen 6y ago
You don't have a factory that grows food for example. Yet. Modern farms come pretty close, and there are lots of ideas to close the gap.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes points to you for noticing there's a supply chain. But that's automating too. The remaining 'developers' in industry are Engineers. They number a tiny fraction of the human labor that factories used to employ. The idea the we can 'retrain' line workers is nonsense. They can't all become Engineers, even if we needed 30M more Engineers which we don't. Grasp at straws, sure some business processes might remain unautomated for some time. But it's not going to matter to most Americans. It'll be small change.
- Mirioron 6y ago
  >The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes, if we still built the old stuff, but we don't. We're building better factories for more sophisticated technology. Factories are tools and they've improved just the same as every other tool. Their complexity has increased immensely. Sure, nowadays it still takes less effort to build the factory, but all the things that the factory makes needs a lot more work. Scientists, engineers, software developers, lawyers, PR people etc. I think almost all businesses are going to remain unautomated. Sure, significant parts of the processes will be automated, but not everything. Complexity will keep increasing and we'll likely still need humans to coordinate, because we're not very good at automating the unknown.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    That up-front cost is again, a percent of what the factory floor used to employ. And they're mostly used once at the beginning. To support a model of "build new factories forever" requires endless expansion. The world is no longer expanding at a rate that would support that, not nearly. And I don't see that as a desirable world .
wonderwonder 6y ago
We are close to factories that grow food with indoor vertical farming: https://www.plenty.ag/ https://www.plenty.ag/ Any repetitive job can eventually be automated away. The largest impact is going to be fully autonomous self driving cars. That alone has the chance of eliminating 4 million driving jobs, including truckers and cab drivers. This does not factor in the ~3 million people that drive for Uber and lyft. These are not people who are going to be able to easily switch to another position. Even fast food is exploring automating their restaurants. As far as building the factories, procuring raw materials, etc. all those jobs already exist and are staffed. With the constant advancement in 3d printing, even those jobs may be reduced. The target near me used to regularly have 10+ registers open, now it generally has 3 plus 6 self checkout lines.
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  I think the other side of this coin is particularly glaring as well. Since we decided to blame those workless people, and punish them if they don’t find work. They _have_ to find work. Which means more competition for consumption, you _have_ to consume their stuff to keep them fed. Which means more senseless competition to produce shit no one actual my need, more ads, more tele marketing, poisonous food, exploiting of addictive behavior, more jealously guarded trade secrets and “intellectual property” walls instead of cooperation and peer production. In essense by insisting that all people must be employed at all time, we force the market to produce anti-value.
  - wonderwonder 6y ago
    Absolutely. The current crisis drives your point home. We forcing workers to go to work and expose themselves, if they refuse, they are fired and ineligible for unemployment. They are forced to martyr themselves for the a system designed to efficiently move resources from the bottom to the top. We have somehow convinced people that making other people rich while we toil our lives away is good. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright
falcolas 6y ago
Your example of farms is rather poorly put. Modern farms (thinking of corn and wheat and other staple crops) cover hundreds of acres and are managed by 4-5 people. Farms of this size couldn't exist in the past because they required too large of a workforce. And, given the current state of automation, most of the work to maintain those farms is highly automated; the operators are mostly monitoring screens from non-integrated screens and acting as a simple PID controller. Where did all of those thousands of previously employed farm hands go? Into the factories. But as they're pushed out of the factories, where do they go next?
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Agreed. Except up your estimate by an order of magnitude or three. Farms of 10,000 acres managed by a handful of people. John Deere estimates 100M acres under automated tillage today, worldwide.

nitrogen 6y ago

You don't have a factory that grows food for example. Yet. Modern farms come pretty close, and there are lots of ideas to close the gap.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes points to you for noticing there's a supply chain. But that's automating too. The remaining 'developers' in industry are Engineers. They number a tiny fraction of the human labor that factories used to employ. The idea the we can 'retrain' line workers is nonsense. They can't all become Engineers, even if we needed 30M more Engineers which we don't. Grasp at straws, sure some business processes might remain unautomated for some time. But it's not going to matter to most Americans. It'll be small change.

Mirioron 6y ago
>The human cost of building those factories, and maintaining them, is 1% of what the hand labor used to be. Yes, if we still built the old stuff, but we don't. We're building better factories for more sophisticated technology. Factories are tools and they've improved just the same as every other tool. Their complexity has increased immensely. Sure, nowadays it still takes less effort to build the factory, but all the things that the factory makes needs a lot more work. Scientists, engineers, software developers, lawyers, PR people etc. I think almost all businesses are going to remain unautomated. Sure, significant parts of the processes will be automated, but not everything. Complexity will keep increasing and we'll likely still need humans to coordinate, because we're not very good at automating the unknown.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  That up-front cost is again, a percent of what the factory floor used to employ. And they're mostly used once at the beginning. To support a model of "build new factories forever" requires endless expansion. The world is no longer expanding at a rate that would support that, not nearly. And I don't see that as a desirable world .

wonderwonder 6y ago

We are close to factories that grow food with indoor vertical farming: https://www.plenty.ag/ https://www.plenty.ag/ Any repetitive job can eventually be automated away. The largest impact is going to be fully autonomous self driving cars. That alone has the chance of eliminating 4 million driving jobs, including truckers and cab drivers. This does not factor in the ~3 million people that drive for Uber and lyft. These are not people who are going to be able to easily switch to another position. Even fast food is exploring automating their restaurants. As far as building the factories, procuring raw materials, etc. all those jobs already exist and are staffed. With the constant advancement in 3d printing, even those jobs may be reduced. The target near me used to regularly have 10+ registers open, now it generally has 3 plus 6 self checkout lines.

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
I think the other side of this coin is particularly glaring as well. Since we decided to blame those workless people, and punish them if they don’t find work. They _have_ to find work. Which means more competition for consumption, you _have_ to consume their stuff to keep them fed. Which means more senseless competition to produce shit no one actual my need, more ads, more tele marketing, poisonous food, exploiting of addictive behavior, more jealously guarded trade secrets and “intellectual property” walls instead of cooperation and peer production. In essense by insisting that all people must be employed at all time, we force the market to produce anti-value.
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  Absolutely. The current crisis drives your point home. We forcing workers to go to work and expose themselves, if they refuse, they are fired and ineligible for unemployment. They are forced to martyr themselves for the a system designed to efficiently move resources from the bottom to the top. We have somehow convinced people that making other people rich while we toil our lives away is good. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright

falcolas 6y ago

Your example of farms is rather poorly put. Modern farms (thinking of corn and wheat and other staple crops) cover hundreds of acres and are managed by 4-5 people. Farms of this size couldn't exist in the past because they required too large of a workforce. And, given the current state of automation, most of the work to maintain those farms is highly automated; the operators are mostly monitoring screens from non-integrated screens and acting as a simple PID controller. Where did all of those thousands of previously employed farm hands go? Into the factories. But as they're pushed out of the factories, where do they go next?

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Agreed. Except up your estimate by an order of magnitude or three. Farms of 10,000 acres managed by a handful of people. John Deere estimates 100M acres under automated tillage today, worldwide.