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These discussions are always focused on the "robots". What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice

These discussions are always focused on the "robots". What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice recognition systems, data pipelines, software powered gig economy, algorithmic traders? These types of automation have been in place for decades, and all of them cut costs for the owners of them and reduce the number of workers needed. Many of them can be operated with minimal training. The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation? We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades, and we've been completely blind to it because we're always talking about "the robots that are coming to take our jobs". We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally. In fact, we needed to years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if this explains a lot of the productivity-pay gap [1] [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

matheusmoreira 5y ago
The only possible outcome is automation of most if not literally all jobs. At this point, capitalism will necessarily break down because it depends on continuous consumption and there will be no disposable income with which to consume. Hopefully society will evolve into post scarcity at this point instead of a cyberpunk dystopia where gigacorporations create artificial scarcity economies just to maintain the status quo.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I'm hopeful for a solarpunk future. https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg
- jordwest 5y ago
  Frankly I think we're already at the tipping point for that. If I think about it, how many jobs are actually involved in: * Providing food * Providing shelter * Providing healthcare You could argue just about everything else is really a form of artifical scarcity, none of it is needed for survival, perhaps just for comfort. That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer. So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.
  - contingencies 5y ago
    Are we already post-scarcity? Thanks to industrialization, in the first and second world yes for basic food, clothing and shelter, as well as other mass-consumed products. Things that remain (increasingly) scarce in my view - globally - are broadly educated people, political/economic/behavioral freedoms, unspoiled nature and the temporal wealth and whim to access it regularly.
  - bnralt 5y ago
    This is an important point that gets overlooked. It's likely that we already reached something like "the singularity," but most of the extra productive output didn't go towards finding ways to increase productivity, it went towards things without a positive impact and often a negative impact on society (advertising, junk food, conspicuous consumption, regulatory capture, sales, etc.).
mullingitover 5y ago
> What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice recognition systems, data pipelines, software powered gig economy, algorithmic traders? At first I thought you were bringing these up to point out that the robots create other jobs, because robots don't just spring from the earth fully formed and ready to run forever. They require an army of engineers to build/operate/maintain them. > We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.
- selestify 5y ago
  For your first point: the new jobs required is of course much less than the jobs removed, or else there wouldn't be a point to automation in the first place because it's not saving on labor efficiency. Agreed on your second point. Attack the inequality, not the automation.
- ordinaryradical 5y ago
  The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia—except usually with more murder. So I would say the political problem is very much not solved and post-scarcity Utopianism isn’t going to get us there.
  - scollet 5y ago
    I don't think you're projecting as far as OP. F U L L Y is Star Trek years away, not next Wednesday.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) that replaces private capitalism as a hack to avoid the requirement of developing proletarian class identity in a developed capitalist system present in OG Marxism. That this turns into a dystopian nightmare that mirrors and even exaggerates the horrors of private capitalism and fails to actually bypass private capitalism is a surprise to no one but Leninists, least of all non-Leninist Communists.
jdminhbg 5y ago
> These types of automation have been in place for decades, and all of them cut costs for the owners of them and reduce the number of workers needed. They reduce the number of workers needed to produce the same amount of output. What is slightly counterintuitive is that having done so, they may actually increase the demand for workers, because they now can produce far more output in the same amount of time. Modern languages and tools have made programming much more productive, and now there are lots more programmers and they get paid more.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Theoretically yes, but in practice the given industry as a whole often does not need much more output even if the per unit cost of the output declines. Like, you don't need significantly more accounting just because you can use spreadsheets now. And not all automation increases worker productivity, lots of it just eliminates workers from certain jobs altogether, e.g. self driving cars / trucks.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    This can indeed cut both ways. Instead of needing huge numbers of manual workers to harvest the wheat, one guy can sit in an air-conditioned combine harvester cab for a few hours listening to tunes, and we get the same food. Humans can (and do) eat slightly more food given it's cheap and readily available, but there's a limit. So, the percentage of workers engaged in agricultural work fell. On the other hand, turns out that once a shirt is cheap humans will buy not just one extra so there's one to wear and one to wash, but a dozen, or hundreds. And they'll throw it away when it's a little worn not when it falls apart. So while industrialisation of fabric and clothing production made clothes cheap, the result wasn't that fewer people were employed in that work but that we just all bought more clothes.
    - bryanlarsen 5y ago
      > one guy can sit in an air-conditioned combine harvester cab for a few hours listening to tunes, I hope he's not listening to tunes. A change in the sound it's making is often the first warning that your $500,000 piece of machinery is about to self destruct.
clusterfish 5y ago
> who benefits most in that equation? That depends on how the extra profit is distributed, aka taxation and social welfare. Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se. For some workers, that's a huge benefit. If they get ousted they have to find another degenerate position or work for a lower salary. Usually it's both.
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    I mean that money is the benefit, not the work itself. Our wealth distribution system is not suitable for significant levels of automation at all - that is the root of the problem, not automation itself.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      People measure prosperity by employment, not the work they do, which is how we get backwards economics where it is better to destroy the planet.
forgotmysn 5y ago
the term "robotics" is beginning to expand in some ways though. "robotic process automation" refers to tools and techniques to automate a lot of the data-entry and human-facing software components of industrial workflows. so while hard robotics tend to dominate the media, it's important to remember that automation is making gains in many areas.
codekilla 5y ago
What you're describing was outlined pretty clearly in The New Ruthless Economy[1] in 2005. A very interesting read, given when it was publshed. [1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-ruthless-economy-9780195179835?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-ruthless-eco...
- jordwest 5y ago
  Interesting, thanks! Will definitely give it a read.
grandmczeb 5y ago
> The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. Per your source, the "productivity-pay gap" largely explainable through increases in pay inequality while the change in labor's share of income is a much smaller factor (and it's worth mentioning EPI is probably overstating the size of the gap in the first place[1]). As an alternative to your hypothesis, my guess is that workers in jobs amenable to automation are reaping huge increases in pay (e.g. engineers) while jobs that are more difficult to automate are falling behind. > We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally. I wholeheartedly agree. I propose we find ways to automate low productivity jobs so all workers can enjoy the associated benefits. [1] https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-the-pay-productivity-gap/ https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-the-pay-productivity-ga...
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Completely blind to it? Not likely. Marx was writing about it in the 19th century. Computing based automation and management is just the accelerated evolution of the automation techniques from the industrial revolution. It's complicated.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Is it complicated? Greater efficiency is good, because it makes society "richer". If that societal wealth increase doesn't go to the average person, then why should they care about efficiency? The luddites didn't hate efficiency, or machines, they sabotaged the machines because that was one of the few ways they could hurt the interests of the people who were mistreating them. Specific machines were targetted because of who owned them, and the way they were treating workers. For wider context this time the royal families of Europe were waging war to prevent democracy spreading. A great deal of this funding came from the UK, yet at the same time their poor people were rioting due to lack of food, and tax increases to fund the war. Folk songs at the time tell tales of people signing up to fight the French because the other option was starvation. It's convenient that we remember these people as "silly folk who were scared of machines" rather than "downtrodden masses revolting against a cruel dictatorship waging war against democracy".
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    I'm sympathetic, for sure. I say complicated because it's not a straightforward linear causal relationship or one where we can just say "bad". Automation causes the rate of profit to rise for a period. And for some segment of the working population this can lead to increased prosperity. For others less so, as you point out. But in the long run, competition between businesses leads to at least a short term equilibrium, where automation and labour exploitation rates are roughly equal, or monopolization has occurred. And then rates of profits can plummet and then it's really bad all around. The point here is that I don't think it's automation itself that creates the unequal distribution of incomes. It's just the market economy. The market economy creates automation in order to gain competitive advantage. Curtailing automation isn't going to improve wealth inequality. Might even make it worse. Equalization of wealth requires the intervention of the working population either through unionization or forcing the state to intervene.
akgoel 5y ago
I’ve owned a CNC machine shop for 40 years. As we’ve added automation, so have our competitors. All gains from automation have been competed away - there are no gains going to the owners of the capital, as we are all competing. Meanwhile, the real wages for the employees have been falling for those 40 years. Instead, I’d argue that returns are going to IP holders.
- codekansas 5y ago
  Well, and to the people buying your products, presumably
  - harry8 5y ago
    Who may also have margin competed away. And to the overall economy - more stuff with less resources is growth. But that's all going to capital, look at the s&p500 vs wages over the same time period.
    - codekansas 5y ago
      OP owns a CNC shop which is almost tautologically capital
      - rjtavares 5y ago
        Saying a CNC shop is comparable to a an S&P500 company because they're both capital is like saying a retail clerk is comparable to an NFL player because they're both labour. While true, it's not really relevant to this discussion. I agree the parent comment should be more specific, but his point stands: gains are going to a few companies that automate everyone else's processes or benefit from the huge economies of scale that automation provides.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Haven’t many of the gains gone to the customers who are buying CNC parts? That competition and reduction in labor cost per part means that some people can now afford CNC parts who couldn’t have afforded manually crafted parts previously.
zozbot234 5y ago
> The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation? The effect of productivity improvements on the real incomes of workers ultimately depend on how the change affects productivity of the marginal worker. You need to look at more than a single firm to figure this out. If the availability of spreadsheets makes clerical workers so much more productive that overall demand for their services increases more than four-fold (which might be definitely possible), the marginal spreadsheet-tweaking activity will be paid quite a lot, and workers' income will increase.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  That doesn’t match real world outcomes though. Quantity demanded goes down. Wages go down. Mostly because automation isn’t making that person more valuable, it’s just removing it from that persons role. Skilled labor becomes unskilled labor. Supply goes way up. Clerks are a great example. They used to do a lot for a store and had to know all the products. Now a clerk is just a last mile button presser. They don’t add much value at all. They’re not doing 4x the work. They’re doing 0.1x the work. Trying to say “but the value couldn’t be captured without that guy” is wishful thinking.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    > They used to do a lot for a store and had to know all the products. Now a clerk is just a last mile button presser. They don’t add much value at all. They’re not doing 4x the work. They’re doing 0.1x the work. Trying to say “but the value couldn’t be captured without that guy” is wishful thinking. Not to detract from your overall point, which is absolutely correct, but having been a grocery clerk there's a slightly different phenomenon in play there. Having a clerk who knows the products well is a big help, but you really only need one available at a time. So rather than make acquiring that knowledge an actual part of the job, they rely on scale to have enough workers who learn it through their own initiative.
Consultant32452 5y ago
>If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation? In a market economy competition will squeeze down those newfound profits. The owner of the company benefits, the employee benefits, and all the customers benefit.
errcorrectcode 5y ago
Robots don't matter much to the worker productivity of industrialized nations because manufacturing is mostly outsourced to less industrialized ones. Robotic automation matters to less industrialized nations. Deep learning will eventually eat 99% of office jobs, including software and hardware development. Self-programming and self-designing systems seem as inevitable as killer robots. These automation technologies can lead to a rapid collapse of standards of living in industrialized nations that most people "won't see coming." As a consequence of massive efficiencies, regulatory capture, and political influence, the long-term vicious cycle trend is towards most of humanity becoming borderline homeless with a small middle class and a tiny strata of insanely rich royalty. There is an obvious solution to spiraling inequality "pure" capitalists refuse to consider on "religious" grounds: take past, present, and future absurd gains from the billionaires and redistribute them according to a needs-based formula.
- ladyattis 5y ago
  I don't believe machine learning will ever reach the level of sophistication that you're thinking. The reality is that we can't even make 5th generation (goal oriented) programming languages yet. Mostly because we keep chasing the unicorn of generalized AI rather than building the foundations of useful programming standards. Like imagine using optimization the way we do with loops and branching to handle more complex strategy based problems. We don't even have that level of sophistication in our compilers yet. We're in what amounts to as the Neolithic Age of programming.
  - errcorrectcode 5y ago
    > yet. You appear to be denying the progress made over the past 30 years by deep learning, ML frameworks, constraint solvers, and immense computing power. Prolog has been around for 50 years. I suggest you look at what it can do. Programming languages exist only for humans to specify and discuss intended computing behavior. There are plenty of goal-solving algorithms and heuristics already. Turing completeness is all that's necessary. "Flying car" programming languages are unnecessary because they offer no additional intrinsic power, only convenience of expressiveness that could be provided by libraries. Self-programming and -designing systems, if left unconstrained, will develop their own IRs, design, and manufacturing specification protocols that would likely become rapidly incomprehensible. They won't need anthropocentric programming languages after several iterations because it would be an inefficiency. That's what the technological singularity will look like. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Blue collar work vs. white collar work is actually the issue. The assumption is that blue collar work is the stuff that gets automated away. The reality is that blue collar workers are getting more productive instead but are still essential. And we already have vastly less of them than we used to due to the industrial revolution and the wave of automation in the last centuries. Meanwhile a lot of white collar work is melting away or increasingly of the "bullshit job" variety where the added value is dubious. So, a strange side effect of automation is that we've created a lot of bullshit jobs instead of creating mass unemployment. An even stranger side effect is that a lot of people with college degrees are now doing artisanal stuff instead of committing to a life long of a meaning-less and soul crushing office dwelling existence. So, they're choosing to become blue collar workers. And artisanal here of course means "choosing to do things by hand" instead of maximizing quantity and revenue through industrialized processes. Artisanal is more fun to do and quality of the goods means they are worth more. You can buy bread from a factory, or buy a sour dough bread from a hipster with a college degree. Lack of automation is the whole point there. What the lockdown last year showed quite convincingly is that a lot of white collar jobs are not really that essential and it doesn't matter that much if productivity there drops by few tens of a percent. The economy suffered a little but mostly that's because of reduced consumption and not of reduced production. And even that is hardly proportional to the productivity loss of masses of people suddenly no longer doing what they were supposed to be doing or doing a lot less of it. A lot of those people never got back to their former level of "productivity" and it continues to not matter economically. Their most important job is spending the money they earn. The labor performed earning that money is secondary. It's a great argument for basic income: give people money and get them to spend it in order to boost the economy. It's a lot more effective than funneling it to the offshore accounts of the 1 per-centers. They hoard rather than spend their money. And it frees people up to do something more valuable than stare at a cubicle wall doing something that absolutely and provably does not matter economically. Like bake bread, create art, or do something else that people might spend on.
- cyberlurker 5y ago
  In many organizations, the lockdown showed productivity went up as white collar people worked from home. Some even worked longer hours of their own accord.
ladyattis 5y ago
Most things that are perceived as repetitive and therefore something you can automate aren't likely to be easily automated. The reason is that many repetitive tasks have contingencies that have to be mapped out. Even some of these aren't covered by employee training or corporate policies and so it depends on the judgment of the individual employees which in the end destroys the fantasy of robots everywhere and programs to replace paralegals and accountants.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

The only possible outcome is automation of most if not literally all jobs. At this point, capitalism will necessarily break down because it depends on continuous consumption and there will be no disposable income with which to consume. Hopefully society will evolve into post scarcity at this point instead of a cyberpunk dystopia where gigacorporations create artificial scarcity economies just to maintain the status quo.

tomrod 5y ago
I'm hopeful for a solarpunk future. https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg https://i.redd.it/k51q3zw8hn981.jpg
jordwest 5y ago
Frankly I think we're already at the tipping point for that. If I think about it, how many jobs are actually involved in: * Providing food * Providing shelter * Providing healthcare You could argue just about everything else is really a form of artifical scarcity, none of it is needed for survival, perhaps just for comfort. That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer. So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Are we already post-scarcity? Thanks to industrialization, in the first and second world yes for basic food, clothing and shelter, as well as other mass-consumed products. Things that remain (increasingly) scarce in my view - globally - are broadly educated people, political/economic/behavioral freedoms, unspoiled nature and the temporal wealth and whim to access it regularly.
- bnralt 5y ago
  This is an important point that gets overlooked. It's likely that we already reached something like "the singularity," but most of the extra productive output didn't go towards finding ways to increase productivity, it went towards things without a positive impact and often a negative impact on society (advertising, junk food, conspicuous consumption, regulatory capture, sales, etc.).

mullingitover 5y ago

> What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice recognition systems, data pipelines, software powered gig economy, algorithmic traders? At first I thought you were bringing these up to point out that the robots create other jobs, because robots don't just spring from the earth fully formed and ready to run forever. They require an army of engineers to build/operate/maintain them. > We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.

selestify 5y ago
For your first point: the new jobs required is of course much less than the jobs removed, or else there wouldn't be a point to automation in the first place because it's not saving on labor efficiency. Agreed on your second point. Attack the inequality, not the automation.
ordinaryradical 5y ago
The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia—except usually with more murder. So I would say the political problem is very much not solved and post-scarcity Utopianism isn’t going to get us there.
- scollet 5y ago
  I don't think you're projecting as far as OP. F U L L Y is Star Trek years away, not next Wednesday.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) that replaces private capitalism as a hack to avoid the requirement of developing proletarian class identity in a developed capitalist system present in OG Marxism. That this turns into a dystopian nightmare that mirrors and even exaggerates the horrors of private capitalism and fails to actually bypass private capitalism is a surprise to no one but Leninists, least of all non-Leninist Communists.

jdminhbg 5y ago

> These types of automation have been in place for decades, and all of them cut costs for the owners of them and reduce the number of workers needed. They reduce the number of workers needed to produce the same amount of output. What is slightly counterintuitive is that having done so, they may actually increase the demand for workers, because they now can produce far more output in the same amount of time. Modern languages and tools have made programming much more productive, and now there are lots more programmers and they get paid more.

clusterfish 5y ago
Theoretically yes, but in practice the given industry as a whole often does not need much more output even if the per unit cost of the output declines. Like, you don't need significantly more accounting just because you can use spreadsheets now. And not all automation increases worker productivity, lots of it just eliminates workers from certain jobs altogether, e.g. self driving cars / trucks.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  This can indeed cut both ways. Instead of needing huge numbers of manual workers to harvest the wheat, one guy can sit in an air-conditioned combine harvester cab for a few hours listening to tunes, and we get the same food. Humans can (and do) eat slightly more food given it's cheap and readily available, but there's a limit. So, the percentage of workers engaged in agricultural work fell. On the other hand, turns out that once a shirt is cheap humans will buy not just one extra so there's one to wear and one to wash, but a dozen, or hundreds. And they'll throw it away when it's a little worn not when it falls apart. So while industrialisation of fabric and clothing production made clothes cheap, the result wasn't that fewer people were employed in that work but that we just all bought more clothes.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    > one guy can sit in an air-conditioned combine harvester cab for a few hours listening to tunes, I hope he's not listening to tunes. A change in the sound it's making is often the first warning that your $500,000 piece of machinery is about to self destruct.

clusterfish 5y ago

> who benefits most in that equation? That depends on how the extra profit is distributed, aka taxation and social welfare. Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se.

Supermancho 5y ago
> Slaving away 40 hours a week on a bullshit job that can be trivially automated is not a benefit per se. For some workers, that's a huge benefit. If they get ousted they have to find another degenerate position or work for a lower salary. Usually it's both.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  I mean that money is the benefit, not the work itself. Our wealth distribution system is not suitable for significant levels of automation at all - that is the root of the problem, not automation itself.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    People measure prosperity by employment, not the work they do, which is how we get backwards economics where it is better to destroy the planet.

forgotmysn 5y ago

the term "robotics" is beginning to expand in some ways though. "robotic process automation" refers to tools and techniques to automate a lot of the data-entry and human-facing software components of industrial workflows. so while hard robotics tend to dominate the media, it's important to remember that automation is making gains in many areas.

codekilla 5y ago

What you're describing was outlined pretty clearly in The New Ruthless Economy[1] in 2005. A very interesting read, given when it was publshed. [1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-ruthless-economy-9780195179835?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-ruthless-eco...

jordwest 5y ago
Interesting, thanks! Will definitely give it a read.

grandmczeb 5y ago

> The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. Per your source, the "productivity-pay gap" largely explainable through increases in pay inequality while the change in labor's share of income is a much smaller factor (and it's worth mentioning EPI is probably overstating the size of the gap in the first place[1]). As an alternative to your hypothesis, my guess is that workers in jobs amenable to automation are reaping huge increases in pay (e.g. engineers) while jobs that are more difficult to automate are falling behind. > We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally. I wholeheartedly agree. I propose we find ways to automate low productivity jobs so all workers can enjoy the associated benefits. [1] https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-the-pay-productivity-gap/ https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-the-pay-productivity-ga...

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Completely blind to it? Not likely. Marx was writing about it in the 19th century. Computing based automation and management is just the accelerated evolution of the automation techniques from the industrial revolution. It's complicated.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Is it complicated? Greater efficiency is good, because it makes society "richer". If that societal wealth increase doesn't go to the average person, then why should they care about efficiency? The luddites didn't hate efficiency, or machines, they sabotaged the machines because that was one of the few ways they could hurt the interests of the people who were mistreating them. Specific machines were targetted because of who owned them, and the way they were treating workers. For wider context this time the royal families of Europe were waging war to prevent democracy spreading. A great deal of this funding came from the UK, yet at the same time their poor people were rioting due to lack of food, and tax increases to fund the war. Folk songs at the time tell tales of people signing up to fight the French because the other option was starvation. It's convenient that we remember these people as "silly folk who were scared of machines" rather than "downtrodden masses revolting against a cruel dictatorship waging war against democracy".
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  I'm sympathetic, for sure. I say complicated because it's not a straightforward linear causal relationship or one where we can just say "bad". Automation causes the rate of profit to rise for a period. And for some segment of the working population this can lead to increased prosperity. For others less so, as you point out. But in the long run, competition between businesses leads to at least a short term equilibrium, where automation and labour exploitation rates are roughly equal, or monopolization has occurred. And then rates of profits can plummet and then it's really bad all around. The point here is that I don't think it's automation itself that creates the unequal distribution of incomes. It's just the market economy. The market economy creates automation in order to gain competitive advantage. Curtailing automation isn't going to improve wealth inequality. Might even make it worse. Equalization of wealth requires the intervention of the working population either through unionization or forcing the state to intervene.

akgoel 5y ago

I’ve owned a CNC machine shop for 40 years. As we’ve added automation, so have our competitors. All gains from automation have been competed away - there are no gains going to the owners of the capital, as we are all competing. Meanwhile, the real wages for the employees have been falling for those 40 years. Instead, I’d argue that returns are going to IP holders.

codekansas 5y ago
Well, and to the people buying your products, presumably
- harry8 5y ago
  Who may also have margin competed away. And to the overall economy - more stuff with less resources is growth. But that's all going to capital, look at the s&p500 vs wages over the same time period.
  - codekansas 5y ago
    OP owns a CNC shop which is almost tautologically capital
    - rjtavares 5y ago
      Saying a CNC shop is comparable to a an S&P500 company because they're both capital is like saying a retail clerk is comparable to an NFL player because they're both labour. While true, it's not really relevant to this discussion. I agree the parent comment should be more specific, but his point stands: gains are going to a few companies that automate everyone else's processes or benefit from the huge economies of scale that automation provides.
sokoloff 5y ago
Haven’t many of the gains gone to the customers who are buying CNC parts? That competition and reduction in labor cost per part means that some people can now afford CNC parts who couldn’t have afforded manually crafted parts previously.

zozbot234 5y ago

> The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation? The effect of productivity improvements on the real incomes of workers ultimately depend on how the change affects productivity of the marginal worker. You need to look at more than a single firm to figure this out. If the availability of spreadsheets makes clerical workers so much more productive that overall demand for their services increases more than four-fold (which might be definitely possible), the marginal spreadsheet-tweaking activity will be paid quite a lot, and workers' income will increase.

oneoff786 5y ago
That doesn’t match real world outcomes though. Quantity demanded goes down. Wages go down. Mostly because automation isn’t making that person more valuable, it’s just removing it from that persons role. Skilled labor becomes unskilled labor. Supply goes way up. Clerks are a great example. They used to do a lot for a store and had to know all the products. Now a clerk is just a last mile button presser. They don’t add much value at all. They’re not doing 4x the work. They’re doing 0.1x the work. Trying to say “but the value couldn’t be captured without that guy” is wishful thinking.
- Talanes 5y ago
  > They used to do a lot for a store and had to know all the products. Now a clerk is just a last mile button presser. They don’t add much value at all. They’re not doing 4x the work. They’re doing 0.1x the work. Trying to say “but the value couldn’t be captured without that guy” is wishful thinking. Not to detract from your overall point, which is absolutely correct, but having been a grocery clerk there's a slightly different phenomenon in play there. Having a clerk who knows the products well is a big help, but you really only need one available at a time. So rather than make acquiring that knowledge an actual part of the job, they rely on scale to have enough workers who learn it through their own initiative.

Consultant32452 5y ago

>If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation? In a market economy competition will squeeze down those newfound profits. The owner of the company benefits, the employee benefits, and all the customers benefit.

errcorrectcode 5y ago

Robots don't matter much to the worker productivity of industrialized nations because manufacturing is mostly outsourced to less industrialized ones. Robotic automation matters to less industrialized nations. Deep learning will eventually eat 99% of office jobs, including software and hardware development. Self-programming and self-designing systems seem as inevitable as killer robots. These automation technologies can lead to a rapid collapse of standards of living in industrialized nations that most people "won't see coming." As a consequence of massive efficiencies, regulatory capture, and political influence, the long-term vicious cycle trend is towards most of humanity becoming borderline homeless with a small middle class and a tiny strata of insanely rich royalty. There is an obvious solution to spiraling inequality "pure" capitalists refuse to consider on "religious" grounds: take past, present, and future absurd gains from the billionaires and redistribute them according to a needs-based formula.

ladyattis 5y ago
I don't believe machine learning will ever reach the level of sophistication that you're thinking. The reality is that we can't even make 5th generation (goal oriented) programming languages yet. Mostly because we keep chasing the unicorn of generalized AI rather than building the foundations of useful programming standards. Like imagine using optimization the way we do with loops and branching to handle more complex strategy based problems. We don't even have that level of sophistication in our compilers yet. We're in what amounts to as the Neolithic Age of programming.
- errcorrectcode 5y ago
  > yet. You appear to be denying the progress made over the past 30 years by deep learning, ML frameworks, constraint solvers, and immense computing power. Prolog has been around for 50 years. I suggest you look at what it can do. Programming languages exist only for humans to specify and discuss intended computing behavior. There are plenty of goal-solving algorithms and heuristics already. Turing completeness is all that's necessary. "Flying car" programming languages are unnecessary because they offer no additional intrinsic power, only convenience of expressiveness that could be provided by libraries. Self-programming and -designing systems, if left unconstrained, will develop their own IRs, design, and manufacturing specification protocols that would likely become rapidly incomprehensible. They won't need anthropocentric programming languages after several iterations because it would be an inefficiency. That's what the technological singularity will look like. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Blue collar work vs. white collar work is actually the issue. The assumption is that blue collar work is the stuff that gets automated away. The reality is that blue collar workers are getting more productive instead but are still essential. And we already have vastly less of them than we used to due to the industrial revolution and the wave of automation in the last centuries. Meanwhile a lot of white collar work is melting away or increasingly of the "bullshit job" variety where the added value is dubious. So, a strange side effect of automation is that we've created a lot of bullshit jobs instead of creating mass unemployment. An even stranger side effect is that a lot of people with college degrees are now doing artisanal stuff instead of committing to a life long of a meaning-less and soul crushing office dwelling existence. So, they're choosing to become blue collar workers. And artisanal here of course means "choosing to do things by hand" instead of maximizing quantity and revenue through industrialized processes. Artisanal is more fun to do and quality of the goods means they are worth more. You can buy bread from a factory, or buy a sour dough bread from a hipster with a college degree. Lack of automation is the whole point there. What the lockdown last year showed quite convincingly is that a lot of white collar jobs are not really that essential and it doesn't matter that much if productivity there drops by few tens of a percent. The economy suffered a little but mostly that's because of reduced consumption and not of reduced production. And even that is hardly proportional to the productivity loss of masses of people suddenly no longer doing what they were supposed to be doing or doing a lot less of it. A lot of those people never got back to their former level of "productivity" and it continues to not matter economically. Their most important job is spending the money they earn. The labor performed earning that money is secondary. It's a great argument for basic income: give people money and get them to spend it in order to boost the economy. It's a lot more effective than funneling it to the offshore accounts of the 1 per-centers. They hoard rather than spend their money. And it frees people up to do something more valuable than stare at a cubicle wall doing something that absolutely and provably does not matter economically. Like bake bread, create art, or do something else that people might spend on.

cyberlurker 5y ago
In many organizations, the lockdown showed productivity went up as white collar people worked from home. Some even worked longer hours of their own accord.

ladyattis 5y ago

Most things that are perceived as repetitive and therefore something you can automate aren't likely to be easily automated. The reason is that many repetitive tasks have contingencies that have to be mapped out. Even some of these aren't covered by employee training or corporate policies and so it depends on the judgment of the individual employees which in the end destroys the fantasy of robots everywhere and programs to replace paralegals and accountants.