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The article describes how automation is eating away at low-skill/experience jobs, but doesn’t provide any insight on how we transition from the the collapse of

The article describes how automation is eating away at low-skill/experience jobs, but doesn’t provide any insight on how we transition from the the collapse of minimum wage work to all the things are automated. If food cultivation and harvesting are completely automated, who maintains machines when they break or err? If we leave all of that work to the machines do we lose a skill that’s fungible for sustaining life? Assuming we can completely automate healthcare and AI is responsible for developing new diagnostics and treatments without human oversight. Who acts as a check on these systems and who is responsible for correcting issues when they arise? If we can automate 90% of manual and low-skip labor, who makes up the remaining population responsible for completing those tasks and how are they incentivized to continue performing those tasks? I like the idea of utopian automation, but we don’t have completely automated transportation (maybe one of the closest possibilities). This seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

pmiller2 6y ago
> If we can automate 90% of manual and low-skip labor, who makes up the remaining population responsible for completing those tasks and how are they incentivized to continue performing those tasks? Well, supposing it's all automated, who cares if people perform the tasks or not? More seriously, however, what's the actual incentive to automate "unskilled" labor? Computers are terrible at tasks we find simple, like folding laundry, and the labor of laundry workers is cheap. I think the rest of your hypotheticals are really not of much consequence. If we develop AI diagnostic machines, why do you assume there won't be human doctors, if only to act as researchers? When horses were retired from farming, what was the incentive to maintain the combines and harvesters?
- krapp 6y ago
  The incentive to automate unskilled labor is the same as automating anything else - not having to pay employees who are limited by biological needs like food and sleep or protected by labor laws. Laundry workers may be cheap, but automated laundry workers working 24/7/365 will eventually be cheaper at scale. Amazon is as efficient at exploiting human labor as it's possible to be, but they're absolutely working to put those humans out of work as quickly as possible.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    There has to be a certain point where maintaining the machines becomes more expensive than the labor they would replace. That's just simple supply and demand, as the very act of automation would vastly increase the supply of labor. The question is whether it's even ethical to allow humans to work for such a pittance.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      If UBI became a reality, I’d argue it’s unethical to not let them work for whatever wage they choose to accept.
      - pmiller2 6y ago
        At the point where the value of human labor drops so low that humans become viable over machines again, why even bother with money at all? You'd be looking at essentially a post-scarcity world, although subject to the finite resources of the Earth and the amount of energy it gets from the Sun.
deleted 6y ago
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pmiller2 6y ago

> If we can automate 90% of manual and low-skip labor, who makes up the remaining population responsible for completing those tasks and how are they incentivized to continue performing those tasks? Well, supposing it's all automated, who cares if people perform the tasks or not? More seriously, however, what's the actual incentive to automate "unskilled" labor? Computers are terrible at tasks we find simple, like folding laundry, and the labor of laundry workers is cheap. I think the rest of your hypotheticals are really not of much consequence. If we develop AI diagnostic machines, why do you assume there won't be human doctors, if only to act as researchers? When horses were retired from farming, what was the incentive to maintain the combines and harvesters?

krapp 6y ago
The incentive to automate unskilled labor is the same as automating anything else - not having to pay employees who are limited by biological needs like food and sleep or protected by labor laws. Laundry workers may be cheap, but automated laundry workers working 24/7/365 will eventually be cheaper at scale. Amazon is as efficient at exploiting human labor as it's possible to be, but they're absolutely working to put those humans out of work as quickly as possible.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  There has to be a certain point where maintaining the machines becomes more expensive than the labor they would replace. That's just simple supply and demand, as the very act of automation would vastly increase the supply of labor. The question is whether it's even ethical to allow humans to work for such a pittance.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    If UBI became a reality, I’d argue it’s unethical to not let them work for whatever wage they choose to accept.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      At the point where the value of human labor drops so low that humans become viable over machines again, why even bother with money at all? You'd be looking at essentially a post-scarcity world, although subject to the finite resources of the Earth and the amount of energy it gets from the Sun.

deleted 6y ago

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