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There have been lots of technology x replacing a manual process with the promise that "now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely

There have been lots of technology x replacing a manual process with the promise that "now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits." In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now they can do 2x the work they did before!" As long as companies are driven by profits, and that profit can be increased by higher enployee productivity in the same number of legal working hours, we will continue to do so. Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list.

voisin 5y ago
Would this be solved by a universal basic income? Is that “now I can do 2x what I did before” due only to financial requirements of the household?
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  My opinion on this is that a better goal (though not an exclusive alternative to) UBI is what I call "basic needs automation". Instead of distributing arbitrary amounts of money to pay for basic needs, it seems like it would be better if we can automate the maintenance of those needs to a point where the costs are negligible. Easier said than done, of course, but imagine reaching a technological point where instead of having self-driving cars, we have self-sustaining food/clothing/shelter.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    If you don't distribute the money, automation can make people poorer just as easily as it can make people richer.
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      I can see how automation would make poor and middle income people poorer, but I don’t see why automation would depress the wealth of the already wealthy.
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        Well, "people" here means 99% or 99.9% or maybe a couple extra nines. I really didn't mean the next 0.01%. Anyway, it can, by a complex process that makes an entire society poorer once people gets thrown out of the economy. That includes the absurdly rich too. It's just that if this is the only point where it bothers you, honestly I don't even care about your opinion.
        aspenmayer 5y ago
        Automation can put everyone out of a job, for all I care about jobs and the economy. They are potentially mutually beneficial, but usually extremely unfavorable to labor in terms of sharing profits. No jobs means no unemployment.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    This stuff always seems like appealing to magic. If magic could meet our basic needs, it would be great too. But unlike magic, people appeal to this all the time, despite it being equally impossible today. The reason I bring that up is that it distracts from solutions that we can actually implement.
    - danielvaughn 5y ago
      The problem is that any alternative or additional solution could also be interpreted to be a distraction, so that doesn't convince me much. I don't see it as an exclusive alternative, as in we should do this instead of UBI. My point is about the long term trajectory of innovation. In the US at least, our roads are a public service. You don't have to pay to be on a road (outside of a few exceptions). I think a good long term vision for scientists is to reduce the cost of our basic needs to the point that all our essential needs could be a public service. I don't see why that's a distraction.
lrem 5y ago
Well, the important skill is saying no. While you won't get far saying no to the employer, all those other things on the todo list got there somehow. I'm now fighting the good fight of getting my own time back. I suggest trying the same.
simonh 5y ago
Then again I think it's inarguable (I'm clearly wrong, people will argue with it) that modern life for most of us is incomparably better than the lives most of us had in the past. My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better. One drag on this is property prices. A huge amount of people's incomes go into property, but that's largely something we do to ourselves and each other. There's a very inflexible housing market here in the UK, so we're all in competition for the best houses, and bid up their value against each other.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  > My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better. Most people aren't having children[0], largely because they can't afford them. This is probably selection bias. My kid has a better life than I did, but that's mainly because I have avoided the addictions my parents had. [0]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population-grew-in-2021-slowest-rate-since-founding-of-the-nation.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
  - reissbaker 5y ago
    Largely because they can't afford them. Number of children inversely correlates to income [1], with the poorest families having the most children and the richest families having the fewest. You're right that birth rates are falling, but I don't think you're right about largely why. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
    - flerchin 5y ago
      This is an interesting point. You seem to be implying that rising incomes are causing people to choose to have fewer children. However, it could just as easily be that having children is a drag on people's incomes.
grenoire 5y ago
I do understand this very well as someone who builds process automation tools. There are infinite menial jobs to automate, but in the end the benefit is only realised by the capital owners and employers, rarely the employees.
- eloisius 5y ago
  The benefit is also realized by you in the process of automating it.
- randomdata 5y ago
  When I was kid it was said that if you went to university and researched/developed your work there that you would be able to make more money. Idea being that the technology would become capital of your own, which you could offer to business under more favourable terms than if you were to create it for the business as an employee. I suppose in reality that there will always be someone willing to take the quick cash instead.
bluGill 5y ago
More relaxing is not a goal! Very few people can spend spend days in bed if not forced to. If you try your body will betray you by getting up and doing something. You can do "more work for the man", or you can do a hobby of some sort. Either way though you are up and doing something.
- danaris 5y ago
  "Relaxing" is not synonymous with "lying in bed." For some people, reading is relaxing. For some, writing is relaxing. For others, playing video games is relaxing. For yet others, making video games is relaxing. The point is being able to decide and structure your own time, rather than being beholden to someone else's demands just in order to have enough money to keep existing on this planet.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  > You can do "more work for the man", or you can do a hobby of some sort. Either way though you are up and doing something. Way to miss the point completely. Clearly “relaxing” in this context meant “leisure” or “free time”.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    No, you miss the point: what is the difference between a hobby and a job? You are doing something either way. I'm not the only person who likes my job. I'm not the only person with a hobby that sometimes gets frustrated with something in the hobby.
    - avgcorrection 5y ago
      The freedom/free time part is obviously the distinction!
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Sure, but why is that important enough to make in the first place? Note if you don't have a background in philosophy you probably can't answer this. If you do the answer will take many pages
reissbaker 5y ago
Sure, but I also have a supercomputer in my pocket now, which is pretty neat. We couldn't even have this conversation without incredible amounts of technological innovation that's happened over the last few decades — well, at least not without endless "letters to the editor" happening over the span of weeks (and maybe not getting printed at all). Automated X replacing manual Y is usually good, IMO, even if the idea that it'll result in more leisure time is pretty much bunk. Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list. Isn't that good? You certainly could give yourself more leisure time — there's no capitalist overlord forcing you to do your own personal todo list — but since you have more time, you've decided to do more things to help yourself.
- onion2k 5y ago
  I also have a supercomputer in my pocket now And I thought you were pleased to see me. Slightly more seriously, and delightfully pedantically, you don't. A supercomputer isn't a supercomputer because it does a lot of computations every second. It's the utility of the machine that makes it a supercomputer. Your phone can model entire weather systems or the intricacies of millisecond-by-millisecond fluid dynamics inside a nuclear explosion, but you choose to play Angry Birds on it, so it isn't a supercomputer. It's just a very, very fast, and immensely wasteful PC. You could do everything you do on your phone with a much less well-specced device. We all could.
  - reissbaker 5y ago
    But you choose to play Angry Birds on it. Nah, I mostly read HN and take photos with it. But — that in itself has been pretty society-changing (well, maybe not the part about reading HN). Literally every person, just about, has a reasonably good camera in their pocket capable of shooting video, that connects to the internet — and by the way, the quality of those images does actually relate to the thing being a supercomputer (thanks, computational photography). Would the George Floyd related protests have happened without someone's cameraphone taping cops killing him in cold blood? Definitely not: only cable news companies decided what to shoot and — equally critically — what to broadcast. And on a more mundane note: ubiquitous internet-connected cameras certainly revolutionized how I pick restaurants for dinner.
lm28469 5y ago
> In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now they can do 2x the work they did before!" And wages didn't follow the increase in productivity: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
deleted 5y ago
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sam0x17 5y ago
> As long as companies are driven by profits Capital really doesn't drive innovation at all except in very specific situations where there are sufficient regulations and guardrails to coax companies in the direction of progress (and you certainly won't see innovation happening under completely unregulated capitalism). It's almost always independent and/or individual people -- researchers, open source contributors, scientists, etc -- who come up with society-changing technologies and ideas. In the mid 1900s, the large tech corporations ran enormous corporate laboratories, like the famous Bell Labs that would churn out things like this (Unix, almost the internet, etc). Rampant de-regulation of capital in the 70s and 80s led to an industry shift that removed these guardrails and incentives and made it easier to simply monopolize, price fix, and acquire your way to the top, as the oil and rail tycoons had in the early 1900s, and that is where we find ourselves now. FANG companies are not innovators -- they have become machines that swallow up the innovations of others and either neutralize or begrudgingly copy them in such a way that still manages to crush competition via economies of scale. Google, the "great innovator" of search hasn't innovated on the topic of search engines in over a decade, and instead relies on multi-billion dollar deals to ensure Google is the default search engine on every mobile device in the world. When a competitor emerges, they acquire and shutter it, or sit pretty knowing economies of scale will ensure new competitors won't get sufficient traction. For the last decade, Apple has simply watched the tech industry very closely, cultivated their image as a glorified fashion company (everything driven by design and status-symbol imagery), exerted monopolistic control over an entire industry via their app store fees and tight restrictions, and used their unlimited resources to copy or buy their way into the features and ideas actual innovators have proven will play well in the coming years. Amazon uses its size and its control over a global marketplace (that they completely control) to continuously enter new markets and shutter competition with economies of scale, and is taking the same approach with AWS. Notably they won't be innovating on anything outside the realm of "just run it in our network of data centers", and everything they do with AWS is designed to pull you into the walled garden of AWS products. Netflix has simply acquired their way into controlling a large portion of the good movie studios, their only "innovation" being on perpetuating a toxic and cutthroat company culture where everyone is constantly under review and DRM and compression technology to limit who can watch what based on expensive regional licensing deals. All of these companies are threatened by, and afraid of innovation, and they will stop it from happening if they can. They compete and innovate, only if they have to, and would much rather just pay you to not innovate. Capital isn't going to create innovation -- regulation of capital, done correctly, will. Capital has to be dragged into innovating, kicking and screaming.
Aunche 5y ago
> now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits We are exploring more leisurely pursuits, though instead pursuing hobbies and building relationships, we're consuming media. The average American adult spends over half their day doing so. A lot of it is probably passive background noise, but it's a lot nonetheless. https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-nielsen-total-audience-report-august-2020/ https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-niels...
- tehjoker 5y ago
  I think that's because people are tired and are constantly thinking about how they have to go back to work / school soon. If people had more time off, I think more interesting things would happen.
  - czbond 5y ago
    I agree in theory, but disagree in practice. Covid lockdowns taught me the general public is superb at wasting time and being inefficient. Their mind turned to Netflixing all day, making Tiktok dance numbers, etc. I am bullish on machines & software improving because people are incentivized through salaries to improve them. I am bearish / pessimistic on the average humans productive use of time outside of amusement or relaxation. Humanity has taught me that Pareto's principle applies to humans.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      Why shouldn't they relax if they can? It's bizarre to me that we need to regiment the entire population in order to... make sure people don't have fun?
      - czbond 5y ago
        Whether it is human nature, or learned behavior, the typical human is unable to fill their time with productive use over a longer period of time unless purpose is imposed on them. Hence "work". The concept in a more general term is even mentioned in religious text so there must be a basis....
notpachet 5y ago
From a Calvin & Hobbes strip: [DAD] It used to be that if a client wanted something in a week, it was considered a rush job, and he was lucky to get it. Now, with modems, faxes, and car phones, everybody wants everything instantly! Improved technology just increases expectations. These machines don't make life easier -- they make like more harassed. If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do things less efficiently. [CALVIN] Six minutes to microwave this?? Who's got that kind of time?!
- TecoAndJix 5y ago
  Link to the strip - https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/08/17 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/08/17
  - ByThyGrace 5y ago
    Is C&H text searchable? Great find otherwise!
    - dxbydt 5y ago
      The fuck. Its actually searchable! I tried googling this - summer is butter on your chin site:https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/ https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/ found it instantly.
    - TecoAndJix 5y ago
      It is! https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/ https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      Looks like every strip has a transcript embedded in the markup right under the image, which is very thoughtful of them.
- ThinkingGuy 5y ago
  Or as Scott Adams expressed it in chapter 1 of "The Dilbert Future": Good trend: Computers allow us to work 100% faster Unexpected bad thing: Computers generate 300 percent more work
smnrchrds 5y ago
> Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. And that's why building highways does not reduce average commute time—people just move further from the downtown where they work. If you build a new highway that cuts commute time in half, on the population level, the sprawl increases until average population is twice as far and their commute remains the same.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  They may very well be happier because they (as evidenced by their choices) prefer to live in a detached house and have a yard over having a shorter commute. Cars and the highway enabled that increase in happiness, even if commute times are unchanged.
BobbyJo 5y ago
> As long as companies are driven by profits As long as people want more stuff. Company profits have a dependent relationship on consumption. It wouldn't matter if the company produced twice as much if people didn't consume the increased output. You hint at that in your last statement, I just wanted to spell it out.
- haswell 5y ago
  I get what you’re trying to say, but this doesn’t necessarily always apply. For example, demand for some goods is fairly predictable, e.g. certain commodity foodstuff. A profit driven company selling these kinds of goods is focused on increasing their market share, but no matter what, the demand is there. Compare this to something else like SUV sales, where demand exists that probably shouldn’t. Yes, consumer sentiment drives/enables these companies, but the nature of that demand and the behavior it drives is certainly not all equal.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    It isn't equal, but pointing that out downplays the fact that they are in equilibrium. Commodities producers reduce costs to increase profits through greater market share, but without the drive to consume more goods than the present, the excess capacity from the cost reduction would sit idle, which doesn't happen in practice. To make the point more salient, if people were willing to live to the standards of the 1800s, a significant amount of the workforce slaving away could retire right now. People choose increased consumption over leisure time, not corporations, corporations only provide demanded goods.
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
>Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list. This is why all the modern conviences that people adore, including myself, just makes our lives more cluttered and anxiety ridden. Nothing is freeing up our time so that we can focus on self care, relaxation, valuable time with family. It just makes us more able to cram more stuff in. And the "to do list" is never ending. There's always yard work, house work, more constructive things your kids could be doing to get them ahead in life, maybe you could now afford some extra education to further your career, there's always just.. SOMETHING to fill in the new holes we now have. It's not just businesses and profit motives. and one day you look back at it all and often you find that 2 hour walk, was probably mentally and physically healthier for you. How many things in life are like this - where we've scarified our mental health, physical/nutritional health, our privacy, ownership rights, and other rights all in the name of a convenient technology that "simplifies" one problem for us while creating 10 more in it's wake? Then we're all convinced that this new, convenient thing is super valuable and can't be done without.
- chasd00 5y ago
  well the problem is people don't put "self care, relaxation, valuable time with family" on the TODO list. ever. If you make it a priority then you'd get it done.
  - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
    People tend to think meditation (or longer prayer) is a waste of time bc you aren't "doing anything". And once you have anxiety and depression (for most) and only then, Do you realize thats kinda the point.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > well the problem is people don't put "self care, relaxation, valuable time with family" on the TODO list. ever. If you make it a priority then you'd get it done. In general people seem to be fairly bad at getting things that are important but not urgent (hat tip to the Eisenhower Matrix) done unless they establish a habit for it. Holidays are valuable in that they at least reduce the need for coordination between multiple parties somewhat, at least for "valuable time with family", but they don't really help with the "self care and relaxation" bucket. Quite the contrary, for many.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now they can do 2x the work they did before!" I think the reality is more depressing. It’s not companies deciding this, it’s each other. “Now I can do 2x the work I did before.” As a system there’s a feedback loop involved. You only need very few people to decide to undercut each other, but for each person who does, that’s more pressure for the next person to keep up, causing even more pressure on the next people, etc. This is why the 40 hour work week had to come from the top. I doubt we’ll see real leisure time improvements until we see overtime pay starting at 32hr/week or something else top down like that.
deleted 5y ago
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sokoloff 5y ago
Wouldn’t your life be worse off in general if you had to walk for those extra 90 minutes and had fewer things done? If you thought otherwise, why couldn’t you walk now, even though cars exist?
deleted 5y ago
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throwaway0106 5y ago
There's a wide variance in who captures the gains from technology, and most of it seems to come from whether the technology enables new transactions. Transactions are all that matter in a market economy; any work done that doesn't alter the terms of trade is effectively invisible (case: housework). Hence why corporations frequently try to deliver the shittiest products and customer service that will not result in them losing customers, employees try to do the least work possible that will not get them fired, companies aggressively expand into new markets and convert new customers, and employees hunt for promotions and job-hop into better opportunities. Your ability to capture leisure time for yourself is largely related to how well you can judge the minimum amount of work needed to not get fired and then execute on that while saving the rest for yourself; or, alternatively, how much value you can create when you do work so that you can bank the rest in financial assets and live without any further transactions. Hint: the former amount is usually more generous than you think it is, particularly if the latter is very high and you let your employer capture that value. Technologies that result in new transaction types result in large amounts of value being captured by their customers, as well as by the company delivering them. Think of YouTube: millions of people have been able to step into the market previously reserved for entertainers, broadcasters, news anchors, and other TV personalities, and in the process they've made billions for Google, millions for themselves, and cannibalized the whole industries of advertising, journalism, and entertainment. The Internet as a whole has created the top 5 most valuable companies on earth, worth a combined $10T+, as well as millions of other small businesses. Technologies that increase the efficiency of existing transaction types typically only enrich the companies that buy them, at least until they penetrate the market entirely, at which point they only enrich the company that sells them and are just table stakes for the companies that buy them. Think of say the high-availability mainframe market of the early 80s (Stratus and Tandem). When banks started using these to process transactions, bank tellers didn't capture any of this value, because it's not like a bank teller can go open their own bank using these machines. Contrast this to say the Apple II and Visicalc, where people could open up their own business because the technology let them cut expensive secretaries and accountants out of the loop. There's a deep connection between this idea and that of Disruptive vs. Sustaining innovations in The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive innovations are those that create new customers and new transactions, thus opening up new markets. Sustaining innovations are those that improve the efficiency of existing transactions and customer relationships. Sustaining innovations can widen your moat and increase the amount you can charge for your product, but they aren't going to form new businesses or unlock large market that you don't already have a foothold in. This is also why certain VCs get extremely excited about innovations like PCs, the Internet, cryptocurrency, and wearable/ambient computing. Communication, finance, markets, and proximity are the key building blocks that enable transactions; anything that fundamentally changes these systems is likely to be significantly disruptive. Meanwhile your SaaS that improves the efficiency of a niche industry by 5x is much less exciting, even though it has a higher probability of success, because you know exactly who your customers are and are unlikely to be able to create more of them.
zamfi 5y ago
> There have been lots of technology x replacing a manual process with the promise that "now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits." Yeah, the "free to explore more leisurely pursuits" part is contrived in most cases, but there is a real argument for automating work that's "dirty, dangerous, or dull" -- freeing humans to do the parts of the work that's more interesting, meaningful, safer, cleaner, etc.
pm90 5y ago
Unless we get to some sort of AGI (or partial AGI), I don't really see this playing out like this. We're already seeing employers capitulate quite hard when they're short on labor: a stark rise in compensation, shorter work weeks, better benefits and so on.
jdavis703 5y ago
It also means people can make more complicated stuff. For example, it’s crazy seeing what amateurs can do with post-production on TikTok. Far from putting Hollywood professionals out of business, it’s enabled humans to take many parts of mass media for granted, while pros move on to creating ever more dazzling content.
nine_k 5y ago
As a leisurely pursuit, you can now fly anywhere in the world for under $1000 (some planning required), or listen to basically any music ever produced, or play and record whatever music you happen to compose (a couple grand of music gear suffices), or read any book, or publish anything for the entire world basically for free. But if your idea of leisurely activity is laying in a hammock and watch the clouds go by, it's still as expensive as ever. Time is as expensive as ever; for instance, look at your effective hourly rate.
somethoughts 5y ago
As a person with a minimalism view on possessions - I've often wondered if with today's technology such as self vacuuming robots, etc. if we designed new houses around said technology and what it could do today - could many more people be able to have robotic house cleaning. If you could spec out a house to have only unscratchable concrete floors, rounded corners, all furniture must have adequate clearance, a Roomba would be way more effective. I'd buy a house with a spartan bathroom if that meant I never had to houseclean. The Revolving Toilet by Sanitronics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjHbj3qon0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjHbj3qon0
qmmmur 5y ago
Unabomber was right

voisin 5y ago

Would this be solved by a universal basic income? Is that “now I can do 2x what I did before” due only to financial requirements of the household?

danielvaughn 5y ago
My opinion on this is that a better goal (though not an exclusive alternative to) UBI is what I call "basic needs automation". Instead of distributing arbitrary amounts of money to pay for basic needs, it seems like it would be better if we can automate the maintenance of those needs to a point where the costs are negligible. Easier said than done, of course, but imagine reaching a technological point where instead of having self-driving cars, we have self-sustaining food/clothing/shelter.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  If you don't distribute the money, automation can make people poorer just as easily as it can make people richer.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    I can see how automation would make poor and middle income people poorer, but I don’t see why automation would depress the wealth of the already wealthy.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      Well, "people" here means 99% or 99.9% or maybe a couple extra nines. I really didn't mean the next 0.01%. Anyway, it can, by a complex process that makes an entire society poorer once people gets thrown out of the economy. That includes the absurdly rich too. It's just that if this is the only point where it bothers you, honestly I don't even care about your opinion.
      - aspenmayer 5y ago
        Automation can put everyone out of a job, for all I care about jobs and the economy. They are potentially mutually beneficial, but usually extremely unfavorable to labor in terms of sharing profits. No jobs means no unemployment.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  This stuff always seems like appealing to magic. If magic could meet our basic needs, it would be great too. But unlike magic, people appeal to this all the time, despite it being equally impossible today. The reason I bring that up is that it distracts from solutions that we can actually implement.
  - danielvaughn 5y ago
    The problem is that any alternative or additional solution could also be interpreted to be a distraction, so that doesn't convince me much. I don't see it as an exclusive alternative, as in we should do this instead of UBI. My point is about the long term trajectory of innovation. In the US at least, our roads are a public service. You don't have to pay to be on a road (outside of a few exceptions). I think a good long term vision for scientists is to reduce the cost of our basic needs to the point that all our essential needs could be a public service. I don't see why that's a distraction.

lrem 5y ago

Well, the important skill is saying no. While you won't get far saying no to the employer, all those other things on the todo list got there somehow. I'm now fighting the good fight of getting my own time back. I suggest trying the same.

simonh 5y ago

Then again I think it's inarguable (I'm clearly wrong, people will argue with it) that modern life for most of us is incomparably better than the lives most of us had in the past. My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better. One drag on this is property prices. A huge amount of people's incomes go into property, but that's largely something we do to ourselves and each other. There's a very inflexible housing market here in the UK, so we're all in competition for the best houses, and bid up their value against each other.

willcipriano 5y ago
> My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better. Most people aren't having children[0], largely because they can't afford them. This is probably selection bias. My kid has a better life than I did, but that's mainly because I have avoided the addictions my parents had. [0]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population-grew-in-2021-slowest-rate-since-founding-of-the-nation.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
- reissbaker 5y ago
  Largely because they can't afford them. Number of children inversely correlates to income [1], with the poorest families having the most children and the richest families having the fewest. You're right that birth rates are falling, but I don't think you're right about largely why. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
  - flerchin 5y ago
    This is an interesting point. You seem to be implying that rising incomes are causing people to choose to have fewer children. However, it could just as easily be that having children is a drag on people's incomes.

grenoire 5y ago

I do understand this very well as someone who builds process automation tools. There are infinite menial jobs to automate, but in the end the benefit is only realised by the capital owners and employers, rarely the employees.

eloisius 5y ago
The benefit is also realized by you in the process of automating it.
randomdata 5y ago
When I was kid it was said that if you went to university and researched/developed your work there that you would be able to make more money. Idea being that the technology would become capital of your own, which you could offer to business under more favourable terms than if you were to create it for the business as an employee. I suppose in reality that there will always be someone willing to take the quick cash instead.

bluGill 5y ago

More relaxing is not a goal! Very few people can spend spend days in bed if not forced to. If you try your body will betray you by getting up and doing something. You can do "more work for the man", or you can do a hobby of some sort. Either way though you are up and doing something.

danaris 5y ago
"Relaxing" is not synonymous with "lying in bed." For some people, reading is relaxing. For some, writing is relaxing. For others, playing video games is relaxing. For yet others, making video games is relaxing. The point is being able to decide and structure your own time, rather than being beholden to someone else's demands just in order to have enough money to keep existing on this planet.
avgcorrection 5y ago
> You can do "more work for the man", or you can do a hobby of some sort. Either way though you are up and doing something. Way to miss the point completely. Clearly “relaxing” in this context meant “leisure” or “free time”.
- bluGill 5y ago
  No, you miss the point: what is the difference between a hobby and a job? You are doing something either way. I'm not the only person who likes my job. I'm not the only person with a hobby that sometimes gets frustrated with something in the hobby.
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    The freedom/free time part is obviously the distinction!
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Sure, but why is that important enough to make in the first place? Note if you don't have a background in philosophy you probably can't answer this. If you do the answer will take many pages

reissbaker 5y ago

Sure, but I also have a supercomputer in my pocket now, which is pretty neat. We couldn't even have this conversation without incredible amounts of technological innovation that's happened over the last few decades — well, at least not without endless "letters to the editor" happening over the span of weeks (and maybe not getting printed at all). Automated X replacing manual Y is usually good, IMO, even if the idea that it'll result in more leisure time is pretty much bunk. Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list. Isn't that good? You certainly could give yourself more leisure time — there's no capitalist overlord forcing you to do your own personal todo list — but since you have more time, you've decided to do more things to help yourself.

onion2k 5y ago
I also have a supercomputer in my pocket now And I thought you were pleased to see me. Slightly more seriously, and delightfully pedantically, you don't. A supercomputer isn't a supercomputer because it does a lot of computations every second. It's the utility of the machine that makes it a supercomputer. Your phone can model entire weather systems or the intricacies of millisecond-by-millisecond fluid dynamics inside a nuclear explosion, but you choose to play Angry Birds on it, so it isn't a supercomputer. It's just a very, very fast, and immensely wasteful PC. You could do everything you do on your phone with a much less well-specced device. We all could.
- reissbaker 5y ago
  But you choose to play Angry Birds on it. Nah, I mostly read HN and take photos with it. But — that in itself has been pretty society-changing (well, maybe not the part about reading HN). Literally every person, just about, has a reasonably good camera in their pocket capable of shooting video, that connects to the internet — and by the way, the quality of those images does actually relate to the thing being a supercomputer (thanks, computational photography). Would the George Floyd related protests have happened without someone's cameraphone taping cops killing him in cold blood? Definitely not: only cable news companies decided what to shoot and — equally critically — what to broadcast. And on a more mundane note: ubiquitous internet-connected cameras certainly revolutionized how I pick restaurants for dinner.

lm28469 5y ago

> In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now they can do 2x the work they did before!" And wages didn't follow the increase in productivity: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

deleted 5y ago

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sam0x17 5y ago

> As long as companies are driven by profits Capital really doesn't drive innovation at all except in very specific situations where there are sufficient regulations and guardrails to coax companies in the direction of progress (and you certainly won't see innovation happening under completely unregulated capitalism). It's almost always independent and/or individual people -- researchers, open source contributors, scientists, etc -- who come up with society-changing technologies and ideas. In the mid 1900s, the large tech corporations ran enormous corporate laboratories, like the famous Bell Labs that would churn out things like this (Unix, almost the internet, etc). Rampant de-regulation of capital in the 70s and 80s led to an industry shift that removed these guardrails and incentives and made it easier to simply monopolize, price fix, and acquire your way to the top, as the oil and rail tycoons had in the early 1900s, and that is where we find ourselves now. FANG companies are not innovators -- they have become machines that swallow up the innovations of others and either neutralize or begrudgingly copy them in such a way that still manages to crush competition via economies of scale. Google, the "great innovator" of search hasn't innovated on the topic of search engines in over a decade, and instead relies on multi-billion dollar deals to ensure Google is the default search engine on every mobile device in the world. When a competitor emerges, they acquire and shutter it, or sit pretty knowing economies of scale will ensure new competitors won't get sufficient traction. For the last decade, Apple has simply watched the tech industry very closely, cultivated their image as a glorified fashion company (everything driven by design and status-symbol imagery), exerted monopolistic control over an entire industry via their app store fees and tight restrictions, and used their unlimited resources to copy or buy their way into the features and ideas actual innovators have proven will play well in the coming years. Amazon uses its size and its control over a global marketplace (that they completely control) to continuously enter new markets and shutter competition with economies of scale, and is taking the same approach with AWS. Notably they won't be innovating on anything outside the realm of "just run it in our network of data centers", and everything they do with AWS is designed to pull you into the walled garden of AWS products. Netflix has simply acquired their way into controlling a large portion of the good movie studios, their only "innovation" being on perpetuating a toxic and cutthroat company culture where everyone is constantly under review and DRM and compression technology to limit who can watch what based on expensive regional licensing deals. All of these companies are threatened by, and afraid of innovation, and they will stop it from happening if they can. They compete and innovate, only if they have to, and would much rather just pay you to not innovate. Capital isn't going to create innovation -- regulation of capital, done correctly, will. Capital has to be dragged into innovating, kicking and screaming.

Aunche 5y ago

> now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits We are exploring more leisurely pursuits, though instead pursuing hobbies and building relationships, we're consuming media. The average American adult spends over half their day doing so. A lot of it is probably passive background noise, but it's a lot nonetheless. https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-nielsen-total-audience-report-august-2020/ https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-niels...

tehjoker 5y ago
I think that's because people are tired and are constantly thinking about how they have to go back to work / school soon. If people had more time off, I think more interesting things would happen.
- czbond 5y ago
  I agree in theory, but disagree in practice. Covid lockdowns taught me the general public is superb at wasting time and being inefficient. Their mind turned to Netflixing all day, making Tiktok dance numbers, etc. I am bullish on machines & software improving because people are incentivized through salaries to improve them. I am bearish / pessimistic on the average humans productive use of time outside of amusement or relaxation. Humanity has taught me that Pareto's principle applies to humans.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    Why shouldn't they relax if they can? It's bizarre to me that we need to regiment the entire population in order to... make sure people don't have fun?
    - czbond 5y ago
      Whether it is human nature, or learned behavior, the typical human is unable to fill their time with productive use over a longer period of time unless purpose is imposed on them. Hence "work". The concept in a more general term is even mentioned in religious text so there must be a basis....

notpachet 5y ago

From a Calvin & Hobbes strip: [DAD] It used to be that if a client wanted something in a week, it was considered a rush job, and he was lucky to get it. Now, with modems, faxes, and car phones, everybody wants everything instantly! Improved technology just increases expectations. These machines don't make life easier -- they make like more harassed. If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do things less efficiently. [CALVIN] Six minutes to microwave this?? Who's got that kind of time?!

TecoAndJix 5y ago
Link to the strip - https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/08/17 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/08/17
- ByThyGrace 5y ago
  Is C&H text searchable? Great find otherwise!
  - dxbydt 5y ago
    The fuck. Its actually searchable! I tried googling this - summer is butter on your chin site:https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/ https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/ found it instantly.
  - TecoAndJix 5y ago
    It is! https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/ https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    Looks like every strip has a transcript embedded in the markup right under the image, which is very thoughtful of them.
ThinkingGuy 5y ago
Or as Scott Adams expressed it in chapter 1 of "The Dilbert Future": Good trend: Computers allow us to work 100% faster Unexpected bad thing: Computers generate 300 percent more work

smnrchrds 5y ago

> Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. And that's why building highways does not reduce average commute time—people just move further from the downtown where they work. If you build a new highway that cuts commute time in half, on the population level, the sprawl increases until average population is twice as far and their commute remains the same.

sokoloff 5y ago
They may very well be happier because they (as evidenced by their choices) prefer to live in a detached house and have a yard over having a shorter commute. Cars and the highway enabled that increase in happiness, even if commute times are unchanged.

BobbyJo 5y ago

> As long as companies are driven by profits As long as people want more stuff. Company profits have a dependent relationship on consumption. It wouldn't matter if the company produced twice as much if people didn't consume the increased output. You hint at that in your last statement, I just wanted to spell it out.

haswell 5y ago
I get what you’re trying to say, but this doesn’t necessarily always apply. For example, demand for some goods is fairly predictable, e.g. certain commodity foodstuff. A profit driven company selling these kinds of goods is focused on increasing their market share, but no matter what, the demand is there. Compare this to something else like SUV sales, where demand exists that probably shouldn’t. Yes, consumer sentiment drives/enables these companies, but the nature of that demand and the behavior it drives is certainly not all equal.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  It isn't equal, but pointing that out downplays the fact that they are in equilibrium. Commodities producers reduce costs to increase profits through greater market share, but without the drive to consume more goods than the present, the excess capacity from the cost reduction would sit idle, which doesn't happen in practice. To make the point more salient, if people were willing to live to the standards of the 1800s, a significant amount of the workforce slaving away could retire right now. People choose increased consumption over leisure time, not corporations, corporations only provide demanded goods.

loudtieblahblah 5y ago

>Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list. This is why all the modern conviences that people adore, including myself, just makes our lives more cluttered and anxiety ridden. Nothing is freeing up our time so that we can focus on self care, relaxation, valuable time with family. It just makes us more able to cram more stuff in. And the "to do list" is never ending. There's always yard work, house work, more constructive things your kids could be doing to get them ahead in life, maybe you could now afford some extra education to further your career, there's always just.. SOMETHING to fill in the new holes we now have. It's not just businesses and profit motives. and one day you look back at it all and often you find that 2 hour walk, was probably mentally and physically healthier for you. How many things in life are like this - where we've scarified our mental health, physical/nutritional health, our privacy, ownership rights, and other rights all in the name of a convenient technology that "simplifies" one problem for us while creating 10 more in it's wake? Then we're all convinced that this new, convenient thing is super valuable and can't be done without.

chasd00 5y ago
well the problem is people don't put "self care, relaxation, valuable time with family" on the TODO list. ever. If you make it a priority then you'd get it done.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago
  People tend to think meditation (or longer prayer) is a waste of time bc you aren't "doing anything". And once you have anxiety and depression (for most) and only then, Do you realize thats kinda the point.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > well the problem is people don't put "self care, relaxation, valuable time with family" on the TODO list. ever. If you make it a priority then you'd get it done. In general people seem to be fairly bad at getting things that are important but not urgent (hat tip to the Eisenhower Matrix) done unless they establish a habit for it. Holidays are valuable in that they at least reduce the need for coordination between multiple parties somewhat, at least for "valuable time with family", but they don't really help with the "self care and relaxation" bucket. Quite the contrary, for many.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

> In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now they can do 2x the work they did before!" I think the reality is more depressing. It’s not companies deciding this, it’s each other. “Now I can do 2x the work I did before.” As a system there’s a feedback loop involved. You only need very few people to decide to undercut each other, but for each person who does, that’s more pressure for the next person to keep up, causing even more pressure on the next people, etc. This is why the 40 hour work week had to come from the top. I doubt we’ll see real leisure time improvements until we see overtime pay starting at 32hr/week or something else top down like that.

deleted 5y ago

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sokoloff 5y ago

Wouldn’t your life be worse off in general if you had to walk for those extra 90 minutes and had fewer things done? If you thought otherwise, why couldn’t you walk now, even though cars exist?

deleted 5y ago

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throwaway0106 5y ago

There's a wide variance in who captures the gains from technology, and most of it seems to come from whether the technology enables new transactions. Transactions are all that matter in a market economy; any work done that doesn't alter the terms of trade is effectively invisible (case: housework). Hence why corporations frequently try to deliver the shittiest products and customer service that will not result in them losing customers, employees try to do the least work possible that will not get them fired, companies aggressively expand into new markets and convert new customers, and employees hunt for promotions and job-hop into better opportunities. Your ability to capture leisure time for yourself is largely related to how well you can judge the minimum amount of work needed to not get fired and then execute on that while saving the rest for yourself; or, alternatively, how much value you can create when you do work so that you can bank the rest in financial assets and live without any further transactions. Hint: the former amount is usually more generous than you think it is, particularly if the latter is very high and you let your employer capture that value. Technologies that result in new transaction types result in large amounts of value being captured by their customers, as well as by the company delivering them. Think of YouTube: millions of people have been able to step into the market previously reserved for entertainers, broadcasters, news anchors, and other TV personalities, and in the process they've made billions for Google, millions for themselves, and cannibalized the whole industries of advertising, journalism, and entertainment. The Internet as a whole has created the top 5 most valuable companies on earth, worth a combined $10T+, as well as millions of other small businesses. Technologies that increase the efficiency of existing transaction types typically only enrich the companies that buy them, at least until they penetrate the market entirely, at which point they only enrich the company that sells them and are just table stakes for the companies that buy them. Think of say the high-availability mainframe market of the early 80s (Stratus and Tandem). When banks started using these to process transactions, bank tellers didn't capture any of this value, because it's not like a bank teller can go open their own bank using these machines. Contrast this to say the Apple II and Visicalc, where people could open up their own business because the technology let them cut expensive secretaries and accountants out of the loop. There's a deep connection between this idea and that of Disruptive vs. Sustaining innovations in The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive innovations are those that create new customers and new transactions, thus opening up new markets. Sustaining innovations are those that improve the efficiency of existing transactions and customer relationships. Sustaining innovations can widen your moat and increase the amount you can charge for your product, but they aren't going to form new businesses or unlock large market that you don't already have a foothold in. This is also why certain VCs get extremely excited about innovations like PCs, the Internet, cryptocurrency, and wearable/ambient computing. Communication, finance, markets, and proximity are the key building blocks that enable transactions; anything that fundamentally changes these systems is likely to be significantly disruptive. Meanwhile your SaaS that improves the efficiency of a niche industry by 5x is much less exciting, even though it has a higher probability of success, because you know exactly who your customers are and are unlikely to be able to create more of them.

zamfi 5y ago

> There have been lots of technology x replacing a manual process with the promise that "now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits." Yeah, the "free to explore more leisurely pursuits" part is contrived in most cases, but there is a real argument for automating work that's "dirty, dangerous, or dull" -- freeing humans to do the parts of the work that's more interesting, meaningful, safer, cleaner, etc.

pm90 5y ago

Unless we get to some sort of AGI (or partial AGI), I don't really see this playing out like this. We're already seeing employers capitulate quite hard when they're short on labor: a stark rise in compensation, shorter work weeks, better benefits and so on.

jdavis703 5y ago

It also means people can make more complicated stuff. For example, it’s crazy seeing what amateurs can do with post-production on TikTok. Far from putting Hollywood professionals out of business, it’s enabled humans to take many parts of mass media for granted, while pros move on to creating ever more dazzling content.

nine_k 5y ago

As a leisurely pursuit, you can now fly anywhere in the world for under $1000 (some planning required), or listen to basically any music ever produced, or play and record whatever music you happen to compose (a couple grand of music gear suffices), or read any book, or publish anything for the entire world basically for free. But if your idea of leisurely activity is laying in a hammock and watch the clouds go by, it's still as expensive as ever. Time is as expensive as ever; for instance, look at your effective hourly rate.

somethoughts 5y ago

As a person with a minimalism view on possessions - I've often wondered if with today's technology such as self vacuuming robots, etc. if we designed new houses around said technology and what it could do today - could many more people be able to have robotic house cleaning. If you could spec out a house to have only unscratchable concrete floors, rounded corners, all furniture must have adequate clearance, a Roomba would be way more effective. I'd buy a house with a spartan bathroom if that meant I never had to houseclean. The Revolving Toilet by Sanitronics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjHbj3qon0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjHbj3qon0

qmmmur 5y ago

Unabomber was right