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Here's the thing. This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies

Here's the thing. This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies. At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility. The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. There is no magical future where AI serves as a democratizing "labor enhancer" for the masses. The value-add of some random person will be 0 in nearly all cases. We will have to decouple our implicit assumption that a person's value is tied to their potential economic value.

skhunted 2y ago
I believe labor is worth whatever the employer can get away with. As such the value of the cheapest labor is what society allows companies to get away with. An employee's wages should be high enough to live off of and this should be enforced by having high labor standards.
- deleted 2y ago
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- rlpb 2y ago
  That's all very well for those lucky enough to be employed. In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed? Eventually, that's going to be nearly everyone.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed? A lot of work that's absolutely needed for our survival is still paid dogshit: think construction, cleaning, waste disposal, agriculture, fruit picking, etc. Even in developed countries with human rights, most of this work is done by what are basically modern slave workers usually from abroad on dinghy visas. Those are the jobs getting the least amount of automation. Robotics is insanely far away from reaching the speed, dexterity, cognition, perception, adaptability and cost for that to be automated at the same rock bottom prices as human slaves.
  - skhunted 2y ago
    Currently we live in a society in which a few people have more wealth than tens of millions. The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and there needs to be an evening out of this distribution. Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      > Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment. In other words let's never tackle the problem of underemployment? A good way to ensure that something never gets done is to require a very hard thing to be done before it.
      - skhunted 2y ago
        Your statement assumes a conclusion that has not been established and indeed that conclusion is wrong in my opinion. We can tax wealth and tax money transfers out of the country and do a host of other things to equalize things. We can establish labor standards that mandate a certain level of living for workers. We can also require a high level of labor standards for imported goods. As an extreme example of how easy it can be to better equalize the distribution of wealth, and not one that I'm advocating for, the Soviets did a great job of ensuring that economic inequality was low. Of course this was obtained by ensuring that everyone was equally poor.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  The combination of a growing no/low/medium-skill large workforce in the US makes for unlivable wages for most people because there are too many people chasing too few jobs. America doesn't do traditional factories per the Rust Belt and offshoring, but when it does, they are highly automated and don't employ as many people as they used to. America either needs to find a way to put labor supply to work or it is going to have to give money to people so they can survive until we can find something useful or meaningful for them to do. Perhaps America should heavily invest in a wider range of community, education, and healthcare social enterprises to provide services that aren't easily automated and are lacking. America needs stronger, effective unions too.
  - galdosdi 2y ago
    third option is dispose of them by letting whoever can't find a job fall into (if they're lucky) being NEETs at a relative's house, or (if unlucky) meth and fentanyl addiction in encampments, scrounging off scraps, essentially in a waiting room for a quick death, while the masses are distracted by mass media with one unrelated distraction after another in the meantime, the defeated homeless addicts serve as a "reserve army of labor" or as george carlin put it to "scare the hell out of the middle class" in other words, keep wages down and enforce docility for those who are still lucky enough to have jobs The third option is what is happening right now. It's pathetic. The ruling class has perfected its use of media technology to influence the masses so well that we can even analyze, discuss, and reveal their methods without fear, because even if we announce it from the rooftops the masses will still turn back to their TVs and tiktoks and forget they heard anything, dividing their attention among 100 distractions to keep them from ever banding together.
Rinzler89 2y ago
>At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. It's not just automation that made low-skill labor worth shit, it's also the next to zero import tariffs on cheap textile and e-waste from overseas. We traded the cost of our labor for cheap mass produced junk. Put tariffs on imports proportional to the lack of environmental and human rights regulations the source country has or doesn't have, and boom, problem solved.
- ketzo 2y ago
  And by "problem solved", of course, you mean "very large cost of living increases for the poorest 50% of the country" Not even saying that you're wrong. But tariffs/onshoring don't exist in a vacuum. It's much more expensive to make anything in the U.S., and people do still want to buy things.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Yeah, there's definitely downsides to that since there's no free lunch, but maybe our society should focus on providing affordable essentials for most (education, housing, healthcare, etc), instead of gleiing at the though of getting a new games console for only $199 and that GDP went up by 2%, while food, rent and medical went up by 10%. Optimizing our society for excessive consumerism and the eternal "line must go up" race, just to plow the wealth in the hands of a few billionaires, at the expense of workers and the environment, doesn't seem like the best long term.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      The poor spend a higher percentage of their income on imports than the rich do.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        Imports that are actually necessary or frivolities? Also, how were poor people surviving without cheap offshore imports before those became a thing?
simonsarris 2y ago
> At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. That is nonsense. In the highly automated USA labor commands an extremely high wage relative to highly non-automated countries (or almost any country, for that matter). Compare low-skilled comp in the US to somewhere like India, or even Japan - which has a lot less automation in shops and offices than you might expect, and correspondingly lower wages.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  It's impressive how many otherwise apparently intelligent people here comment to state as facts what are really their entirely made up opinions growing from some pet dogma. Even when a statement could be debunked with a minimum of consideration (such as in this example) it gets put forth as if it were a sophisticated truth.
tryptophan 2y ago
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- silverquiet 2y ago
  Or is the US government too incompetent to keep them out? Are not the nine most terrifying words in the English language: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  The US created that problem for itself, it can deal with it. Don't ruin others and you won't have refugees.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  Yes, all the illegals will need to do is sign up with their government ID and then they - hey, wait a second.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    An ID is made exactly for that in California: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification-cards/assembly-bill-ab-60-driver-licenses/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification... I believe it is this law that drove the need for "real ids" with a star on them. Bonus points for creating a new "revenue stream" of those needing the star. The goal seems to be to grow the voter base on the left.
michael9423 2y ago
Actually, it's the opposite. At the level of automation we've reached, labor is worth, per hour, way more than 100 years ago. The problem is just that this value is siphoned off by shareholders who do not have to work to receive the monetary value that should go to the worker. So the issue is simply in how corporations are set up and how the stock market is designed. The entire system is designed to drain as much value out of hardworking people into the pockets of those who do not work, but simply own shares. Being able to buy and sell shares is not problematic per se, but there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company. In other words, all workers of a rich company should be (relatively spoken) rich, corresponding to the value they provided to the company.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  And I would say that developed western nations, including the USA, have done a pretty good job of providing subsidies and benefits for low skilled workers, so they can get on the lowest rung of the totem pole and contribute to society without starving. We specifically have food stamps, the EITC, welfare, child tax credit, housing vouchers, and so on specifically so they can provide valuable labor to society (and minimum wage is definitely a cost to businesses) and not starve.
  - vaidhy 2y ago
    and I would assume you would agree that these benefits be expanded as needed and cover a larger population if necessary, right? In fact, it would correct if everyone gets these living expenses taken care of, right?
    - monero-xmr 2y ago
      No I don’t want to give free housing to rich people. I support means tested benefits. The goal is to make people self sufficient, not dependent on the government handout for life.
  - organsnyder 2y ago
jrockway 2y ago
I don't think this is strictly true. I think that Amazon could automate more of their order fulfillment if they were willing to invest in that. I also think that for the jobs that do need humans, they could afford health insurance (really not insurance these days, just a way of paying for some healthcare pre-tax) and to fully-fund the employees 401(k) or similar. Like, nobody shops on Amazon because they have the best price. If some other company starts doing same-day delivery for a wide variety of products, and the employees are treated well, and it costs $5 more per package... who cares? I'd switch to them overnight. Honestly, Amazon is kind of the snake that's eating it's own tail. Nobody feels good about buying from Amazon anymore. The customer service treats you like crap. The employees don't do a good job because they'd be fired if they did. The time is right for them to disappear overnight. I already don't trust them for anything expensive; if I'm ordering electronics, I get it through B&H, who makes some minimal amount of effort to ensure that you don't get a brick instead of a camera. Slowly but surely, the rest of the world is chipping away at their empire. "You have to indirectly torture one of our employees to get your thingamajig," isn't helping. I really think that if we fast-forward 20 years, we'll see that "no bathroom breaks, pee in a bottle" didn't make society much richer. (Of course, none of this matters. The early execs are out and incomprehensibly wealthy. I feel bad for the people that saw that and joined late, but will never achieve their goals in that area.)
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Yep. There will be too many people competing for too few jobs, even so-called high demand professional specialities. There are always too many lawyers, and it's not a lawyer joke. We're going to have to reform extreme wealth inequalities and move to UBI and redistribution of wealth, or otherwise there will be a great upheaval and billions will be impoverished and living in favelas in 20 years. Already, there are vastly undercounted millions of homeless and functionally homeless people in America, a supposed first-world countries. To maintain a humane standard of living for all people requires recapturing trillions the ultrarich have taken for themselves.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  There is no "system" nor "reform" that can magically fix a problem that is fundamentally within the modern human soul. Avarice has become the defining characteristic of most people and that reflects in the culture. If you look with the same critical eyes that you use on the government, big businesses and ultra-rich, and use those critical eyes on people near you including family and friends, then you will be quite uncomfortable.
- skulk 2y ago
  > otherwise there will be a great upheaval and billions will be impoverished and living in favelas in 20 years. Let me just... yep. 1.1 billion living in slums or slum-like conditions today. We're already there.
tgv 2y ago
> The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. That's pertinently false.
- sethammons 2y ago
  All it takes in one example to change your comment into something that provides additional value to the thread
  - tgv 2y ago
    Sorry, but: first, the usual criticism is that the one who claims has to show some proof, unless it's commonly accepted. The parent comment didn't. It just says "it's A or B", excluding the viability of every other option. Your criticism is better directed at that comment. Second, look at Western/Northern Europe, or if you really insist on making this a US-only discussion: look at the period following WW2. It is possible to pay a living wage and to build a social safety net for the unemployed. It just requires the political guts to regulate the market. Third, you can't just go around making absurd, polarizing comments and demand to be corrected in detail.
    - sethammons 2y ago
      I'm not talking about anything other than your comment which was downvoted when I saw it (and check, yup, still downvoted). That comment just says, "nope" -- and doesn't add anything to the discussion, just "nope." Since that comment was saying that the option is not just a binary A or B, you can change the value of the comment from negative (as evidenced by negative votes) to positive simply by engaging slightly further and saying "It is not just A or B, for example C". I'd be surprised if the comment was downvoted then. I think you are maybe reading more into my reply than I ever intended to put into it. It is a meta comment about a comment.
FrankyHollywood 2y ago
> At the level of automation we've reached in society We have been automating work for many centuries. And after a hundred years Keynes prediction [1] still isn't reality, somehow we keep finding ways of keeping ourselves busy :) [1] https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...
- GeoAtreides 2y ago
  Have we also had for centuries a small glass brick that we can point at things and have the things described (by something that's not human) in real time? And then have that something tells us what do with those things to achieve a goal? Maybe, just maybe, this time is different.
pompino 2y ago
>our implicit assumption that a person's value is tied to their potential economic value. The assumption is that their salary is tied to their potential economic value. Human value and dignity is separate.
keybored 2y ago
What implicit assumption? Implicit? There are only hard facts. This “inevitability” is only caused by private ownership of real, tangible things as well as nebulous things like ideas (or the reproduction of assets that cost marginally nothing). No one talks about what those who sit their asses on these assets are “worth” economically. Because it’s besides the point. They sit on the assets so they win. Those who have nothing to sell but their labor lose. And this wasn’t inevitable. But we have made it so. Now we get to talk about philosophical feel-good nonsense like “decoupling assumptions about a person’s value”. When in an alternate reality we could all share in this plenty equally. Let’s have a fun future being at the mercy of our arbitrary asset-sitting overlords.
sangnoir 2y ago
> As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility Who's going to subscribe to Prime and buy stuff when everyone is poor? The Walmart/Amazon wage strategy only works if the rest of society doesn't defect too. Henry Ford understood that his workers were also consumers.
- vkou 2y ago
  Henry Ford lived in a universe where the odds of the working class getting together and guillotining the owners were non-zero. Most of the West's labour gains were done under the shadow of the Red Scare. Nobody is seriously scared of that in 2024.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    It's still fundamental logic that the masses need to be able to afford your goods if you produce mass market goods. Or are you going to stockpile them?
    - vkou 2y ago
      > It's still fundamental logic that the masses need to be able to afford your goods if you produce mass market goods. It's fundamental logic that unless your company provides something close to 100% of the employment market (as in, you are a complete monopolist on all economic activity), you are better off paying your workers as little as possible. Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base. Let some other sap pay theirs well. Now, if you have other reasons to pay your workers well (competitive demand for their labor, high turnover, need for growth, motivation tied directly to output, etc), then it is also logical to come up with a nice-sounding fairy tale justifying your largess. (Or you might actually be motivated by some kind of chivalristic noblesse oblige largess, and are tricking yourself - or socially signaling to your peers - by coming up with a 'logical' motivation for it. I wouldn't immediately assume this of HF, but I am not exactly a Fordian scholar. All I know about him is that he owned a factory that built cars, was a bit of an anti-semite, and also had a lot of opinions about how his employees should live their lives.)
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al_borland 2y ago
Didn't people make similar claims around the industrial revolution?
- svachalek 2y ago
  Historically humans have been much more adaptable than machines. When machinery catches up to human capabilities, it out-competes them and humans find a new economic niche. In a world where machines are more adaptable and beat us to the new niches, where do we go?
  - hackable_sand 2y ago
    Personally, I am finding the sublime in numerical methods and I have always been horrible at manual algebra. It's like a time travel movie. "We have to go back!" Machines can do math, sure, and even learn the contours of the systems they represent. That's incredible. But machines lack the human interface that allows infinite abstraction. So, humans, left with the power of infinite regress, must teach the machines that are so adamantly automating the tasks we deem important as a species. It is possible now, in 2024, to legislate runaway automation with more human-verified checkpoints and more skilled humans running these checkpoints. Major integration network paths are verified by the veracity of the integral checks performed on the flowing data. From here you can measure capacitance, rate of flow, and begin to inspect the data as far as legislation will allow you to. For any practical scientific purposes, such as analyzing tornado paths and devising a rubric of resource allocation, You can measure all elements as a wave until a significant event occurs (including malicious data vectors). You can tune a sample rate for that. With enough people continuously performing validation analysis on data flow, the machines we rely on to achieve our target numbers can begin to rationalize truth and fiction. -- Here's the catch: we just have to do it right the first time round.
  - al_borland 2y ago
    How does this new niche form? How does the AI know to fill it? How does the AI get access to fill do what it needs to do? How does AI solve the edge? Humanoid robots? Who is going to protect the robots from the people who aim to destroy them? More robots? Are they allowed to kill? How is AI policed? What happens when the AI does something it shouldn't do? What happens when AI decides humans are getting in the way? This is how The Matrix started. I don't think humans are going to just roll over and accept their new AI overlords.
carlosjobim 2y ago
> This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies. A person who is actually working within an industrialized economy produces at least ten times more than what is needed to sustain them. Your attitude is exactly what the communist rulers in the political class and the capitalist rulers in the business and banking class want the serfs to believe. They work together as brothers when it is against the common man. I say it is completely groundless fear. Even non-talented and non-gifted persons can achieve extreme productivity with modern tools and training.
bmitc 2y ago
Right. It's the workers that have zero value add and not the people who sit in offices or at home making hundreds of thousands, tens of millions, or hundreds if millions doing a job anyone could do or even a job that isn't needed at all.
adolph 2y ago
> The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. False dilemma. There are other methods to implement tax and redistribute. Additionally some countries like Canada and Switzerland are taking the lead in offering legal frameworks for life management solutions.
- porksoda 2y ago
  Please say more about "legal frameworks for life management solutions". You can't just drop those words in that order with no further context and walk away.
  - adolph 2y ago
    What is there to add? People have a growing need to make and express choices about hastening unavoidable eventualities. Willing service providers need legal protections and the ability to document a person’s choices. In Switzerland this has grown into a minor tourist industry. https://www.swissbiz.ca/is_article.php?articleid=47 https://www.swissbiz.ca/is_article.php?articleid=47
    - tadfisher 2y ago
      Switzerland and Canada are hardly taking the lead; I live in a US state where assisted suicide has been legal for 27 years.
coffeecloud 2y ago
I'm not sure what you consider low-skilled - but have you tried to hire someone to build or fix anything recently? Labor jobs seem to demand a huge price right now - and I don't think anyone is predicting robots that can tile a backsplash, install a 240v outlet, or even dig a trench for a sewer line anywhere in the near future. Let alone have the cost of owning and operating such a robot be more cost effective than paying a human. I'm much more concerned about lawyers, accountants, marketers, and software engineers than I am people who physically build and fix things.
- ArcaneMoose 2y ago
  Exactly! I used almost the same example as you doing a tier ranking of jobs impacted by AI (https://youtu.be/4KSs29EPd8M https://youtu.be/4KSs29EPd8M)
- adamomada 2y ago
  I’m not sure if it’s what you meant but have you ever tried to build or fix anything recently? It’s the opposite of low-skilled and I’d bet the majority of supposedly high-skilled workers wouldn’t have a hope of completing a job even satisfactorily. Imho labour rates are going up because they are for people who are actually doing real, scientific-definition-of-work while other people collect ridiculous paycheques for chatting on Zoom Sorry if I sound bitter but I implore anyone to give it a shot themselves before they complain about paying for real labour.
  - galdosdi 2y ago
    I've done it and I think it's neither. Neither easier nor harder than software engineering and the like. Just different tools. Very similar in a way really. Why one pays more? Not sure. Some kind of higher barrier to entry for software, weirdly enough. Something about the working with your hands stuff I think makes it easier to persevere than working with something virtual and abstract? Just guessing here. But the smoking gun is, why is abstract math achievement so low in America? Like a small minority of grown adults can do basic algebra. Yet a lot of blue collar work really is just as intellectually demanding. I mean you're constantly solving the [[Planning problem]] and all kinds of problems that come up in [[Operations research]]
muffinman26 2y ago
Isn't it mid-skilled desk jobs that are becoming worth less and less? You can't automate a lot of tasks firefighters do. You need someone to actually show up in-person, in an area where there might be things that interfere with electronics. Automation in cleaning or cooking is pretty minimal. I don't see computers replacing chefs at any of the restaurants in town. We have roombas, but they aren't even particularly good at vacuuming - they can't move furniture to get behind it - and I don't know of anything that automates dusting, etc. There's laundry machines and dishwashers, but they still require human intervention. We have more and more people delivering packages, not less, and self-driving technology is a dangerous/morbid joke. On the other hand, automation of websites is getting better, but we didn't really need most websites anyway.
- atleastoptimal 2y ago
  You can't yet, but with robots you will be able to. Once humanoids are good enough nobody will be, or rightfully want to be a firefighter. Even without AGI, teleoperation could be enough. However once AI is good enough that you don't need a human to operate it then there's no reason to hire a human for any step in the process.
  - ramblenode 2y ago
    There is no clear path to a general android. Every physical task that has been automated with robots requires robots engineered specifically for that task. Engineering, building, and maintaining those robots is a massive expense and only happens for tasks that are lucrative and occur at scale. Much of the economy is in a long tail of tasks that would not be profitable to automate, barring a major revolution in robotics.
  - kevincox 2y ago
    Or more importantly you can make each human far more effective with partial automation (AKA tools).
whoitwas 2y ago
BS. People with the most money have the most power, make laws, and continually grow more powerful. Labor is extremely valuable, but suppressed by those with more money.
dheera 2y ago
> As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility. I'm not 100% sure of this. As a software engineer and AI researcher I actually feel that AI is more likely to replace my job before it replaces some dude hauling boxes in a truck across Colorado during a blizzard and then figuring out how to unload them into the back of a poorly-organized grocery store, or some restaurant chef working with open flames in the back of a restaurant while figuring out how to make something vegan and dealing with someone else's peanut allergy. Robotics+AI will happen eventually, but high-paid computer-based jobs are IMO the easiest targets to replace. Human labor involves dealing with a lot of corner cases safely and it's going to take a while.
szundi 2y ago
According to this we were doomed by the 1950s Then in the 70s Then in the 90s Then now No Comparative Advantage, Google/GPT it
arathis 2y ago
In Australia unskilled labourers are highly sought-after. It's physically demanding but you can do very well for yourself. I think the realities of the workforce are wildly different to what we'd typically experience outside of the tech sector.
locococo 2y ago
I think what we need to remember is that there are two issues with your ststement. 1. Companies need consumers to sell to. If no one earns enough money to buy then the companies gave a problem. 2. If people cannot feed themself from working for others then becoming a subsistence farmer and forming tight knit communities is the best way to survive. People can exist without companies, the reverse is not true.
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freshpretzels 2y ago
I think UBI will be pointless because machines will be able to do all the work. Other machines will fix them. Humans will have everything they need or want deliverable by drone and summonable from their phone. Humans will then focus on love, fun, play, and exploring the subjects they are most passionate about.
raxxorraxor 2y ago
> At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. Almost every form of production uses low skilled labor and there is no technological solution yet. If it were possible, there would be a solution. The same is applicable for health care. The truth is that these companies could easily pay enough but there is a competition to suppress labor wages, the famous race to the bottom.

skhunted 2y ago

I believe labor is worth whatever the employer can get away with. As such the value of the cheapest labor is what society allows companies to get away with. An employee's wages should be high enough to live off of and this should be enforced by having high labor standards.

deleted 2y ago
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rlpb 2y ago
That's all very well for those lucky enough to be employed. In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed? Eventually, that's going to be nearly everyone.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >In a future where an increasing amount of necessary work is done by machines, what about those whose labor is not needed? A lot of work that's absolutely needed for our survival is still paid dogshit: think construction, cleaning, waste disposal, agriculture, fruit picking, etc. Even in developed countries with human rights, most of this work is done by what are basically modern slave workers usually from abroad on dinghy visas. Those are the jobs getting the least amount of automation. Robotics is insanely far away from reaching the speed, dexterity, cognition, perception, adaptability and cost for that to be automated at the same rock bottom prices as human slaves.
- skhunted 2y ago
  Currently we live in a society in which a few people have more wealth than tens of millions. The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and there needs to be an evening out of this distribution. Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    > Let's first have a more equal society and then tackle the problem of underemployment. In other words let's never tackle the problem of underemployment? A good way to ensure that something never gets done is to require a very hard thing to be done before it.
    - skhunted 2y ago
      Your statement assumes a conclusion that has not been established and indeed that conclusion is wrong in my opinion. We can tax wealth and tax money transfers out of the country and do a host of other things to equalize things. We can establish labor standards that mandate a certain level of living for workers. We can also require a high level of labor standards for imported goods. As an extreme example of how easy it can be to better equalize the distribution of wealth, and not one that I'm advocating for, the Soviets did a great job of ensuring that economic inequality was low. Of course this was obtained by ensuring that everyone was equally poor.
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
The combination of a growing no/low/medium-skill large workforce in the US makes for unlivable wages for most people because there are too many people chasing too few jobs. America doesn't do traditional factories per the Rust Belt and offshoring, but when it does, they are highly automated and don't employ as many people as they used to. America either needs to find a way to put labor supply to work or it is going to have to give money to people so they can survive until we can find something useful or meaningful for them to do. Perhaps America should heavily invest in a wider range of community, education, and healthcare social enterprises to provide services that aren't easily automated and are lacking. America needs stronger, effective unions too.
- galdosdi 2y ago
  third option is dispose of them by letting whoever can't find a job fall into (if they're lucky) being NEETs at a relative's house, or (if unlucky) meth and fentanyl addiction in encampments, scrounging off scraps, essentially in a waiting room for a quick death, while the masses are distracted by mass media with one unrelated distraction after another in the meantime, the defeated homeless addicts serve as a "reserve army of labor" or as george carlin put it to "scare the hell out of the middle class" in other words, keep wages down and enforce docility for those who are still lucky enough to have jobs The third option is what is happening right now. It's pathetic. The ruling class has perfected its use of media technology to influence the masses so well that we can even analyze, discuss, and reveal their methods without fear, because even if we announce it from the rooftops the masses will still turn back to their TVs and tiktoks and forget they heard anything, dividing their attention among 100 distractions to keep them from ever banding together.

Rinzler89 2y ago

>At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. It's not just automation that made low-skill labor worth shit, it's also the next to zero import tariffs on cheap textile and e-waste from overseas. We traded the cost of our labor for cheap mass produced junk. Put tariffs on imports proportional to the lack of environmental and human rights regulations the source country has or doesn't have, and boom, problem solved.

ketzo 2y ago
And by "problem solved", of course, you mean "very large cost of living increases for the poorest 50% of the country" Not even saying that you're wrong. But tariffs/onshoring don't exist in a vacuum. It's much more expensive to make anything in the U.S., and people do still want to buy things.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Yeah, there's definitely downsides to that since there's no free lunch, but maybe our society should focus on providing affordable essentials for most (education, housing, healthcare, etc), instead of gleiing at the though of getting a new games console for only $199 and that GDP went up by 2%, while food, rent and medical went up by 10%. Optimizing our society for excessive consumerism and the eternal "line must go up" race, just to plow the wealth in the hands of a few billionaires, at the expense of workers and the environment, doesn't seem like the best long term.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    The poor spend a higher percentage of their income on imports than the rich do.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      Imports that are actually necessary or frivolities? Also, how were poor people surviving without cheap offshore imports before those became a thing?

simonsarris 2y ago

> At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. That is nonsense. In the highly automated USA labor commands an extremely high wage relative to highly non-automated countries (or almost any country, for that matter). Compare low-skilled comp in the US to somewhere like India, or even Japan - which has a lot less automation in shops and offices than you might expect, and correspondingly lower wages.

southernplaces7 2y ago
It's impressive how many otherwise apparently intelligent people here comment to state as facts what are really their entirely made up opinions growing from some pet dogma. Even when a statement could be debunked with a minimum of consideration (such as in this example) it gets put forth as if it were a sophisticated truth.

tryptophan 2y ago

[flagged]

silverquiet 2y ago
Or is the US government too incompetent to keep them out? Are not the nine most terrifying words in the English language: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help?
HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
The US created that problem for itself, it can deal with it. Don't ruin others and you won't have refugees.
SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
Yes, all the illegals will need to do is sign up with their government ID and then they - hey, wait a second.
- sethammons 2y ago
  An ID is made exactly for that in California: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification-cards/assembly-bill-ab-60-driver-licenses/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification... I believe it is this law that drove the need for "real ids" with a star on them. Bonus points for creating a new "revenue stream" of those needing the star. The goal seems to be to grow the voter base on the left.

michael9423 2y ago

Actually, it's the opposite. At the level of automation we've reached, labor is worth, per hour, way more than 100 years ago. The problem is just that this value is siphoned off by shareholders who do not have to work to receive the monetary value that should go to the worker. So the issue is simply in how corporations are set up and how the stock market is designed. The entire system is designed to drain as much value out of hardworking people into the pockets of those who do not work, but simply own shares. Being able to buy and sell shares is not problematic per se, but there should be rules in place that give all workers of a publicly traded company better access to owning parts of said company. In other words, all workers of a rich company should be (relatively spoken) rich, corresponding to the value they provided to the company.

monero-xmr 2y ago
And I would say that developed western nations, including the USA, have done a pretty good job of providing subsidies and benefits for low skilled workers, so they can get on the lowest rung of the totem pole and contribute to society without starving. We specifically have food stamps, the EITC, welfare, child tax credit, housing vouchers, and so on specifically so they can provide valuable labor to society (and minimum wage is definitely a cost to businesses) and not starve.
- vaidhy 2y ago
  and I would assume you would agree that these benefits be expanded as needed and cover a larger population if necessary, right? In fact, it would correct if everyone gets these living expenses taken care of, right?
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    No I don’t want to give free housing to rich people. I support means tested benefits. The goal is to make people self sufficient, not dependent on the government handout for life.
- organsnyder 2y ago

jrockway 2y ago

I don't think this is strictly true. I think that Amazon could automate more of their order fulfillment if they were willing to invest in that. I also think that for the jobs that do need humans, they could afford health insurance (really not insurance these days, just a way of paying for some healthcare pre-tax) and to fully-fund the employees 401(k) or similar. Like, nobody shops on Amazon because they have the best price. If some other company starts doing same-day delivery for a wide variety of products, and the employees are treated well, and it costs $5 more per package... who cares? I'd switch to them overnight. Honestly, Amazon is kind of the snake that's eating it's own tail. Nobody feels good about buying from Amazon anymore. The customer service treats you like crap. The employees don't do a good job because they'd be fired if they did. The time is right for them to disappear overnight. I already don't trust them for anything expensive; if I'm ordering electronics, I get it through B&H, who makes some minimal amount of effort to ensure that you don't get a brick instead of a camera. Slowly but surely, the rest of the world is chipping away at their empire. "You have to indirectly torture one of our employees to get your thingamajig," isn't helping. I really think that if we fast-forward 20 years, we'll see that "no bathroom breaks, pee in a bottle" didn't make society much richer. (Of course, none of this matters. The early execs are out and incomprehensibly wealthy. I feel bad for the people that saw that and joined late, but will never achieve their goals in that area.)

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Yep. There will be too many people competing for too few jobs, even so-called high demand professional specialities. There are always too many lawyers, and it's not a lawyer joke. We're going to have to reform extreme wealth inequalities and move to UBI and redistribution of wealth, or otherwise there will be a great upheaval and billions will be impoverished and living in favelas in 20 years. Already, there are vastly undercounted millions of homeless and functionally homeless people in America, a supposed first-world countries. To maintain a humane standard of living for all people requires recapturing trillions the ultrarich have taken for themselves.

carlosjobim 2y ago
There is no "system" nor "reform" that can magically fix a problem that is fundamentally within the modern human soul. Avarice has become the defining characteristic of most people and that reflects in the culture. If you look with the same critical eyes that you use on the government, big businesses and ultra-rich, and use those critical eyes on people near you including family and friends, then you will be quite uncomfortable.
skulk 2y ago
> otherwise there will be a great upheaval and billions will be impoverished and living in favelas in 20 years. Let me just... yep. 1.1 billion living in slums or slum-like conditions today. We're already there.

tgv 2y ago

> The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. That's pertinently false.

sethammons 2y ago
All it takes in one example to change your comment into something that provides additional value to the thread
- tgv 2y ago
  Sorry, but: first, the usual criticism is that the one who claims has to show some proof, unless it's commonly accepted. The parent comment didn't. It just says "it's A or B", excluding the viability of every other option. Your criticism is better directed at that comment. Second, look at Western/Northern Europe, or if you really insist on making this a US-only discussion: look at the period following WW2. It is possible to pay a living wage and to build a social safety net for the unemployed. It just requires the political guts to regulate the market. Third, you can't just go around making absurd, polarizing comments and demand to be corrected in detail.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    I'm not talking about anything other than your comment which was downvoted when I saw it (and check, yup, still downvoted). That comment just says, "nope" -- and doesn't add anything to the discussion, just "nope." Since that comment was saying that the option is not just a binary A or B, you can change the value of the comment from negative (as evidenced by negative votes) to positive simply by engaging slightly further and saying "It is not just A or B, for example C". I'd be surprised if the comment was downvoted then. I think you are maybe reading more into my reply than I ever intended to put into it. It is a meta comment about a comment.

FrankyHollywood 2y ago

> At the level of automation we've reached in society We have been automating work for many centuries. And after a hundred years Keynes prediction [1] still isn't reality, somehow we keep finding ways of keeping ourselves busy :) [1] https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...

GeoAtreides 2y ago
Have we also had for centuries a small glass brick that we can point at things and have the things described (by something that's not human) in real time? And then have that something tells us what do with those things to achieve a goal? Maybe, just maybe, this time is different.

pompino 2y ago

>our implicit assumption that a person's value is tied to their potential economic value. The assumption is that their salary is tied to their potential economic value. Human value and dignity is separate.

keybored 2y ago

What implicit assumption? Implicit? There are only hard facts. This “inevitability” is only caused by private ownership of real, tangible things as well as nebulous things like ideas (or the reproduction of assets that cost marginally nothing). No one talks about what those who sit their asses on these assets are “worth” economically. Because it’s besides the point. They sit on the assets so they win. Those who have nothing to sell but their labor lose. And this wasn’t inevitable. But we have made it so. Now we get to talk about philosophical feel-good nonsense like “decoupling assumptions about a person’s value”. When in an alternate reality we could all share in this plenty equally. Let’s have a fun future being at the mercy of our arbitrary asset-sitting overlords.

sangnoir 2y ago

> As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility Who's going to subscribe to Prime and buy stuff when everyone is poor? The Walmart/Amazon wage strategy only works if the rest of society doesn't defect too. Henry Ford understood that his workers were also consumers.

vkou 2y ago
Henry Ford lived in a universe where the odds of the working class getting together and guillotining the owners were non-zero. Most of the West's labour gains were done under the shadow of the Red Scare. Nobody is seriously scared of that in 2024.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  It's still fundamental logic that the masses need to be able to afford your goods if you produce mass market goods. Or are you going to stockpile them?
  - vkou 2y ago
    > It's still fundamental logic that the masses need to be able to afford your goods if you produce mass market goods. It's fundamental logic that unless your company provides something close to 100% of the employment market (as in, you are a complete monopolist on all economic activity), you are better off paying your workers as little as possible. Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base. Let some other sap pay theirs well. Now, if you have other reasons to pay your workers well (competitive demand for their labor, high turnover, need for growth, motivation tied directly to output, etc), then it is also logical to come up with a nice-sounding fairy tale justifying your largess. (Or you might actually be motivated by some kind of chivalristic noblesse oblige largess, and are tricking yourself - or socially signaling to your peers - by coming up with a 'logical' motivation for it. I wouldn't immediately assume this of HF, but I am not exactly a Fordian scholar. All I know about him is that he owned a factory that built cars, was a bit of an anti-semite, and also had a lot of opinions about how his employees should live their lives.)

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al_borland 2y ago

Didn't people make similar claims around the industrial revolution?

svachalek 2y ago
Historically humans have been much more adaptable than machines. When machinery catches up to human capabilities, it out-competes them and humans find a new economic niche. In a world where machines are more adaptable and beat us to the new niches, where do we go?
- hackable_sand 2y ago
  Personally, I am finding the sublime in numerical methods and I have always been horrible at manual algebra. It's like a time travel movie. "We have to go back!" Machines can do math, sure, and even learn the contours of the systems they represent. That's incredible. But machines lack the human interface that allows infinite abstraction. So, humans, left with the power of infinite regress, must teach the machines that are so adamantly automating the tasks we deem important as a species. It is possible now, in 2024, to legislate runaway automation with more human-verified checkpoints and more skilled humans running these checkpoints. Major integration network paths are verified by the veracity of the integral checks performed on the flowing data. From here you can measure capacitance, rate of flow, and begin to inspect the data as far as legislation will allow you to. For any practical scientific purposes, such as analyzing tornado paths and devising a rubric of resource allocation, You can measure all elements as a wave until a significant event occurs (including malicious data vectors). You can tune a sample rate for that. With enough people continuously performing validation analysis on data flow, the machines we rely on to achieve our target numbers can begin to rationalize truth and fiction. -- Here's the catch: we just have to do it right the first time round.
- al_borland 2y ago
  How does this new niche form? How does the AI know to fill it? How does the AI get access to fill do what it needs to do? How does AI solve the edge? Humanoid robots? Who is going to protect the robots from the people who aim to destroy them? More robots? Are they allowed to kill? How is AI policed? What happens when the AI does something it shouldn't do? What happens when AI decides humans are getting in the way? This is how The Matrix started. I don't think humans are going to just roll over and accept their new AI overlords.

carlosjobim 2y ago

> This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies. A person who is actually working within an industrialized economy produces at least ten times more than what is needed to sustain them. Your attitude is exactly what the communist rulers in the political class and the capitalist rulers in the business and banking class want the serfs to believe. They work together as brothers when it is against the common man. I say it is completely groundless fear. Even non-talented and non-gifted persons can achieve extreme productivity with modern tools and training.

bmitc 2y ago

Right. It's the workers that have zero value add and not the people who sit in offices or at home making hundreds of thousands, tens of millions, or hundreds if millions doing a job anyone could do or even a job that isn't needed at all.

adolph 2y ago

> The only way around this is to let those people starve or implement UBI. False dilemma. There are other methods to implement tax and redistribute. Additionally some countries like Canada and Switzerland are taking the lead in offering legal frameworks for life management solutions.

porksoda 2y ago
Please say more about "legal frameworks for life management solutions". You can't just drop those words in that order with no further context and walk away.
- adolph 2y ago
  What is there to add? People have a growing need to make and express choices about hastening unavoidable eventualities. Willing service providers need legal protections and the ability to document a person’s choices. In Switzerland this has grown into a minor tourist industry. https://www.swissbiz.ca/is_article.php?articleid=47 https://www.swissbiz.ca/is_article.php?articleid=47
  - tadfisher 2y ago
    Switzerland and Canada are hardly taking the lead; I live in a US state where assisted suicide has been legal for 27 years.

coffeecloud 2y ago

I'm not sure what you consider low-skilled - but have you tried to hire someone to build or fix anything recently? Labor jobs seem to demand a huge price right now - and I don't think anyone is predicting robots that can tile a backsplash, install a 240v outlet, or even dig a trench for a sewer line anywhere in the near future. Let alone have the cost of owning and operating such a robot be more cost effective than paying a human. I'm much more concerned about lawyers, accountants, marketers, and software engineers than I am people who physically build and fix things.

ArcaneMoose 2y ago
Exactly! I used almost the same example as you doing a tier ranking of jobs impacted by AI (https://youtu.be/4KSs29EPd8M https://youtu.be/4KSs29EPd8M)
adamomada 2y ago
I’m not sure if it’s what you meant but have you ever tried to build or fix anything recently? It’s the opposite of low-skilled and I’d bet the majority of supposedly high-skilled workers wouldn’t have a hope of completing a job even satisfactorily. Imho labour rates are going up because they are for people who are actually doing real, scientific-definition-of-work while other people collect ridiculous paycheques for chatting on Zoom Sorry if I sound bitter but I implore anyone to give it a shot themselves before they complain about paying for real labour.
- galdosdi 2y ago
  I've done it and I think it's neither. Neither easier nor harder than software engineering and the like. Just different tools. Very similar in a way really. Why one pays more? Not sure. Some kind of higher barrier to entry for software, weirdly enough. Something about the working with your hands stuff I think makes it easier to persevere than working with something virtual and abstract? Just guessing here. But the smoking gun is, why is abstract math achievement so low in America? Like a small minority of grown adults can do basic algebra. Yet a lot of blue collar work really is just as intellectually demanding. I mean you're constantly solving the [[Planning problem]] and all kinds of problems that come up in [[Operations research]]

muffinman26 2y ago

Isn't it mid-skilled desk jobs that are becoming worth less and less? You can't automate a lot of tasks firefighters do. You need someone to actually show up in-person, in an area where there might be things that interfere with electronics. Automation in cleaning or cooking is pretty minimal. I don't see computers replacing chefs at any of the restaurants in town. We have roombas, but they aren't even particularly good at vacuuming - they can't move furniture to get behind it - and I don't know of anything that automates dusting, etc. There's laundry machines and dishwashers, but they still require human intervention. We have more and more people delivering packages, not less, and self-driving technology is a dangerous/morbid joke. On the other hand, automation of websites is getting better, but we didn't really need most websites anyway.

atleastoptimal 2y ago
You can't yet, but with robots you will be able to. Once humanoids are good enough nobody will be, or rightfully want to be a firefighter. Even without AGI, teleoperation could be enough. However once AI is good enough that you don't need a human to operate it then there's no reason to hire a human for any step in the process.
- ramblenode 2y ago
  There is no clear path to a general android. Every physical task that has been automated with robots requires robots engineered specifically for that task. Engineering, building, and maintaining those robots is a massive expense and only happens for tasks that are lucrative and occur at scale. Much of the economy is in a long tail of tasks that would not be profitable to automate, barring a major revolution in robotics.
- kevincox 2y ago
  Or more importantly you can make each human far more effective with partial automation (AKA tools).

whoitwas 2y ago

BS. People with the most money have the most power, make laws, and continually grow more powerful. Labor is extremely valuable, but suppressed by those with more money.

dheera 2y ago

> As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility. I'm not 100% sure of this. As a software engineer and AI researcher I actually feel that AI is more likely to replace my job before it replaces some dude hauling boxes in a truck across Colorado during a blizzard and then figuring out how to unload them into the back of a poorly-organized grocery store, or some restaurant chef working with open flames in the back of a restaurant while figuring out how to make something vegan and dealing with someone else's peanut allergy. Robotics+AI will happen eventually, but high-paid computer-based jobs are IMO the easiest targets to replace. Human labor involves dealing with a lot of corner cases safely and it's going to take a while.

szundi 2y ago

According to this we were doomed by the 1950s Then in the 70s Then in the 90s Then now No Comparative Advantage, Google/GPT it

arathis 2y ago

In Australia unskilled labourers are highly sought-after. It's physically demanding but you can do very well for yourself. I think the realities of the workforce are wildly different to what we'd typically experience outside of the tech sector.

locococo 2y ago

I think what we need to remember is that there are two issues with your ststement. 1. Companies need consumers to sell to. If no one earns enough money to buy then the companies gave a problem. 2. If people cannot feed themself from working for others then becoming a subsistence farmer and forming tight knit communities is the best way to survive. People can exist without companies, the reverse is not true.

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freshpretzels 2y ago

I think UBI will be pointless because machines will be able to do all the work. Other machines will fix them. Humans will have everything they need or want deliverable by drone and summonable from their phone. Humans will then focus on love, fun, play, and exploring the subjects they are most passionate about.

raxxorraxor 2y ago

> At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. Almost every form of production uses low skilled labor and there is no technological solution yet. If it were possible, there would be a solution. The same is applicable for health care. The truth is that these companies could easily pay enough but there is a competition to suppress labor wages, the famous race to the bottom.