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The fact that productivity gains are bad for employees (labour vs capital) should raise significant questions about the economic systems that we have in place.

The fact that productivity gains are bad for employees (labour vs capital) should raise significant questions about the economic systems that we have in place. Instead, AI is treated as the boogeyman and progress is treated as the devil. These events should be an impetus towards class consciousness, but instead the hate is directed to the token producing machine. I wonder how much of this redirection is a deliberate psyop.

pydry 1y ago
Of course. The humans laying you off are soft and squidgy and politically vulnerable and would prefer you jam your pitchforks into something else.
neepi 1y ago
I think that argument is down the line. We haven’t established if there is a productivity gain yet. And it’s not just about productivity; there is quality too.
emp17344 1y ago
Productivity gains boost the economy. The net result is job creation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy HN is often economically illiterate.
- 29athrowaway 1y ago
  Job creation for robots, yes. Remember that now workers will come in two flavors, human and robot. But robots need no compensation, no health insurance, they don't have any rights, can work 24/7, they cannot sue the company because they have no legal representation, cannot steal from the company, they can suffer an "fatal" accident with minimal liability to the company, they can erase their memory of any liability to the company, will always say yes to everything, training them (for a human = pre-k, kindergarden, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school, etc) for them is transferring a file or receiving commands wirelessly from a central computer, they don't get bored and quit, they don't get unhappy and start looking for jobs. Good luck competing against that. Once one ML model automates a job, you can make a million copies of that model file and that job is gone. Similar to the Borg (one adapts, all adapt). Once robots start building robots, you get an exponential amount of robots that quickly take over. A human needs protection from temperature, noise, injuries, exposure to chemicals, exposure to biohazard, protection from other workers, from management, from animals, from their work equipment and gear, and... from robots! Every aspect of a human is protected including their privacy, biometrics, etc. On the other hand, robots require protection from: nothing. They are completely expendable and their cost will be driven down over time. If you make a robot 33% as productive as a human per unit of time, because it can work 24 hrs instead of 8 hrs, it has the same output. Society in 2025 is a pyramid scheme based on scarcity and now the base of the pyramid will be taken over by robots. The people who are left outside the system will be the government's problem. But unlike in the industrial age, large amounts of people will no longer be a key to power so their political representation and rights will be evaporate. There will be no universal basic income (that would result in humans multiplying geometrically and eating up all the resources). Robots will be the key to power therefore who controls the robots will control the government, that means, oligarchs or superhuman AI. And then at least one oligarch will give full autonomy to the AI to prevail against the other oligarchs (humans are bottlenecks), and in doing so the one who rules everything will be superhuman AI. You may think that people in the future will have cheap access to AGI and therefore be able to scrape a living somehow... the problem is that once large AI conglomerates get all the data they need, access to cheap AI will be cutoff and all the deskilled masses will be left with will be endless brainrot social media feeds and nothing to eat.
  - Joker_vD 1y ago
    Well, yes, manufacturing ideal slaves is really what's automation has always been: humans make rather lousy ones, but they are incredibly versatile instead. If you could just replace humans with rightless machines, which nevertheless are just as capable (except from revolting, of course) — why, the Golden Age would begin, for some.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  I wonder why people reflexively quote a "fallacy" from the year 1891! It wasn't true even back then, as evidenced by the multiple economic crises that followed. Nowadays we have a completely different economy to begin with, saturated with "bullshit jobs" (Graeber) already. The amount of new inventions is finite. In the 1990s we had TGV, Concorde and Maglev trains. Perhaps physical inventions have been somewhat exhausted? What invention is on the horizon that will provide new jobs for those laid off from "bullshit jobs"? How did society support Einstein when he discovered relativity? It didn't: Despite the invention of the tractor in 1892, which, according to HN commentators, should have provided him with a carefree life, he had to take a job in the patent office. Which, according to "AI" fanatics, would now be automated by "AI".
  - emp17344 1y ago
    The economy is not zero-sum. That’s just a fact. Go ahead, cite something to back up your claim.
    - bgwalter 1y ago
      If you want to discuss the "dismal science" in one-liners, you won't get anywhere.
      - emp17344 1y ago
        I’ve provided a source. You haven’t.
  - andy99 1y ago
    The real answer is that administrative overhead will expand to fill any jobs displaced by AI. There's no danger of net job loss, just a higher percentage of bullshit jobs. > he had to take a job in the patent office Do you have any idea how much a patent clerk makes
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > Perhaps physical inventions have been somewhat exhausted? I vividly remember hearing this from a group of elderly adults when I was around maybe 8 years old. I remember being very sad that I missed it: The good times of the economy, the period where all the cool things were invented, the “good times” that were being ruined by all of this new technology that the elderly people thought were against the natural way of how things should be. And it’s always wild to me that I see the same fallacies repeated on HN, inevitably by people who are also convinced that the good times are about to end and all of this new-fangled technology stuff is evil because they just figured out how the world worked in their middle age years and now it’s all changing in ways they find scary.
- autobodie 1y ago
  Literally trickle-down economics.
- elliotto 1y ago
  This is true under an economic system that appropriately distributes the fruits of economic production to workers; perhaps one that existed in the post-ww2 to neoliberal era. But it is untrue under a rentier / technofeudal / oligarch economy, in which all excess profits are captured by a cabal of the owner class. Which of these states describes the modern economy is a political exercise.
  - emp17344 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - goatlover 1y ago
      We're headed in that direction. Why do you think the tech billionaires have been aligning themselves with the Project 2025 architects and Trump?
    - elliotto 1y ago
      I would encourage you to read books like Varoufakis' Technofeudalism and Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. The distribution of wealth and capture of profits has changed significantly and no longer resembles the economic environment of previous generations.
    - tomhow 1y ago
      > Laughably false. Please edit out swipes like this from comments on HN.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- viccis 1y ago
  Economics is a pseudo-science typically used to launder political ideology, but this "fallacy" is particularly ill suited to this discussion. Yes, it's true that automation doesn't necessarily cause a net unemployment across the board to go up. But it can still decimate employment in the automated sectors. From that link: >While many workers fear that automation or artificial intelligence will take their jobs, history has shown that when jobs in some sectors disappear, jobs in new sectors are created. One example is the United States, where a century of increasing productivity and technological improvements changed the percentage of Americans employed in the production of food from 41% of the workforce in 1900 to 2% in 2000. The problem with AI is that it tends to automate away skilled jobs, ones that sometimes required many years of study and educational debt to get. So the net result, with respect to software engineering, which was the context of the discussion is here, is not "job creation." The net result is that people (especially the junior ones who just got out of school with a pile of debt) are now forced to compete for jobs they aren't necessary any more qualified for than people without those degrees. This applies to other things where AI massively reduces the number of people needed. Journalism, art asset creation, etc. These are the kinds of cushy and often fulfilling jobs that are only possible because our grandparents and their parents, and so on, worked backbreaking or mind numbing jobs to build the kind of economy that would support these kind of careers. Thanks AI! My kid might never have to worry about the horrors of creative engineering or artistic careers, freeing up room for the real joy of being a gig economy slave or a factory shift worker!
  - emp17344 1y ago
    >Economics is a pseudo-science typically used to launder political ideology This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard on here. Perfect example of conspiratorial thinking. Automation has always resulted in economic growth. This time will be no different.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Economics is inherently tied to politics, and economic theory is merely created to satisfy various political desires. Our economic understanding is inherently limited to just capitalism. That's all we know, and our theories are constrained within that environment. However, throughout human history there have been a plethora of economies that operated under different rules. > Automation has always resulted in economic growth This, while true, does not mean that further automation will result in economic growth. For example, under a capitalist economy, 100% automation results in the entire economy collapsing. Because the economy is predicated on consumerism, which requires employment. In order to produce things, you need people to buy them. Seems simple, but it's a huge problem with capitalism that we repeatedly bandaid. Obviously, we can't let people who can't work just rot in the street, because that's unpleasant. So we develop systems like disability, Medicaid, Social Security, education, etc to bolt-on top of capitalism to fill in the gaps. We are completely and utterly not prepared for extreme automation.
- woopsn 1y ago
  To be fair the firm's goal is, explicitly, to "replace most economically valuable labor".
- gorpy7 1y ago
  I always get a little triggered when i hear the phrase job creation. it’s like a solution in search of a problem. here idk if you’re using it in the way i usually hear it because i generally agree -productivity gains boost the economy. for me, i wish the focus was on value creation. i think of the economy like a bike, the slower it goes the harder it is to balance. i come from a biology background and there there is ‘boom bust’ as a widespread and normal process. if humans are clever enough, even when we run out of resources and are about to bust, we can just suddenly invent fertilizer or countless other things. we took natural gas and added value to it. humans have lots of tricks to keep the bicycle chooching along. Regarding ai, it’s a systemic change. most people aren’t great at systems thinking because most people are specialists. so it’s not too likely you’ll hear a salient take on what ai will do despite some rather smart people commenting. The one trend i like to look at is sort of a scale reset or, how do you say forest from the trees? what i mean is, one of corporate’s great advantages are their size and swath of roles and the coordination that allows them to have an outsized advantage-essentially leveraging the collection of specialist to gain a dominate effect in working ‘the system’(navigating government, economy or scale, overwhelming capital, etc). Enter AI, subsuming these roles into one thing and sort of resetting the required scale to have some of the corporate power/advantages. Of course these are some rosy shades but i often approach new things with “what’s the best that could happen” and it has served me well.
- tom_m 1y ago
  Yea, I believed that for a while and still do...but we're going to go through a rough patch first. There's a bunch of people who don't understand how this works and are looking for a get rich quick scheme. Very lazy people. They're going to further devalue employees and expect unrealistic outcomes. It's going to take some time here before people learn how AI fits into the every day and along the way there's going to be some wild stuff. I also expect there to be a very very strong addiction or cult-like behavior. Mental health will suffer as well. Very dangerous times.
- goatlover 1y ago
  Productivity gains also boost wealth inequality. Too much wealth inequality has negative effects on democracy and society in general. AI has the possibility of making the tech billionaires far more wealthy and influential.
- TFYS 1y ago
  They boost the economy if there exist enough mechanisms that spread the generated gains to everyone. Those mechanisms used to be unions, political power of the working class and the demand for labor. The first two are close to nonexistant now, and the third one is being eroded at an increasing speed. The closer to human abilities automation gets, the less room there is for new human jobs to be created. At some point any new job invented can also be done by an AI, and at that point productivity gains have no mechanism with which to spread into the economy. At that point the owners of the machines will get everything they want from them and they'll have no need to pay other humans anything.
- satiated_grue 1y ago
  "The economy" (GDP) being boosted is very unevenly distributed. Are the jobs created good jobs - that pay decently, and that people want to do?
- xela79 1y ago
  uncontrolled productivity gains that don't feed the added value of that extra productivity back into the system is failed. you end up with the 0.1% having all the money. hmmm... wonder what country has this balance.
fallingknife 1y ago
Given how much better employees have it now than before all the productivity gains of recent history, the only question I have about the economic system is how can we get more of that?
heavyset_go 1y ago
At the same time, there's a reason machine-breaking was made a capital crime 200 years ago. I'd argue that people drawing their ire upon the tools of their oppression is a step in the right direction towards class consciousness.
xela79 1y ago
> The fact that productivity gains are bad for employees (labour vs capital) should raise significant questions about the economic systems that we have in place. yup, exact same argument was made against installing these machines on the product lines instead of having 20 people there. the problem is not the machine, it's the never ending uncontrolled capitalism of being seeing as a failing company, if your productivity and benefits don't growth year after year. If they stay stagnant? failed company.

pydry 1y ago

Of course. The humans laying you off are soft and squidgy and politically vulnerable and would prefer you jam your pitchforks into something else.

neepi 1y ago

I think that argument is down the line. We haven’t established if there is a productivity gain yet. And it’s not just about productivity; there is quality too.

emp17344 1y ago

Productivity gains boost the economy. The net result is job creation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy HN is often economically illiterate.

29athrowaway 1y ago
Job creation for robots, yes. Remember that now workers will come in two flavors, human and robot. But robots need no compensation, no health insurance, they don't have any rights, can work 24/7, they cannot sue the company because they have no legal representation, cannot steal from the company, they can suffer an "fatal" accident with minimal liability to the company, they can erase their memory of any liability to the company, will always say yes to everything, training them (for a human = pre-k, kindergarden, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school, etc) for them is transferring a file or receiving commands wirelessly from a central computer, they don't get bored and quit, they don't get unhappy and start looking for jobs. Good luck competing against that. Once one ML model automates a job, you can make a million copies of that model file and that job is gone. Similar to the Borg (one adapts, all adapt). Once robots start building robots, you get an exponential amount of robots that quickly take over. A human needs protection from temperature, noise, injuries, exposure to chemicals, exposure to biohazard, protection from other workers, from management, from animals, from their work equipment and gear, and... from robots! Every aspect of a human is protected including their privacy, biometrics, etc. On the other hand, robots require protection from: nothing. They are completely expendable and their cost will be driven down over time. If you make a robot 33% as productive as a human per unit of time, because it can work 24 hrs instead of 8 hrs, it has the same output. Society in 2025 is a pyramid scheme based on scarcity and now the base of the pyramid will be taken over by robots. The people who are left outside the system will be the government's problem. But unlike in the industrial age, large amounts of people will no longer be a key to power so their political representation and rights will be evaporate. There will be no universal basic income (that would result in humans multiplying geometrically and eating up all the resources). Robots will be the key to power therefore who controls the robots will control the government, that means, oligarchs or superhuman AI. And then at least one oligarch will give full autonomy to the AI to prevail against the other oligarchs (humans are bottlenecks), and in doing so the one who rules everything will be superhuman AI. You may think that people in the future will have cheap access to AGI and therefore be able to scrape a living somehow... the problem is that once large AI conglomerates get all the data they need, access to cheap AI will be cutoff and all the deskilled masses will be left with will be endless brainrot social media feeds and nothing to eat.
- Joker_vD 1y ago
  Well, yes, manufacturing ideal slaves is really what's automation has always been: humans make rather lousy ones, but they are incredibly versatile instead. If you could just replace humans with rightless machines, which nevertheless are just as capable (except from revolting, of course) — why, the Golden Age would begin, for some.
bgwalter 1y ago
I wonder why people reflexively quote a "fallacy" from the year 1891! It wasn't true even back then, as evidenced by the multiple economic crises that followed. Nowadays we have a completely different economy to begin with, saturated with "bullshit jobs" (Graeber) already. The amount of new inventions is finite. In the 1990s we had TGV, Concorde and Maglev trains. Perhaps physical inventions have been somewhat exhausted? What invention is on the horizon that will provide new jobs for those laid off from "bullshit jobs"? How did society support Einstein when he discovered relativity? It didn't: Despite the invention of the tractor in 1892, which, according to HN commentators, should have provided him with a carefree life, he had to take a job in the patent office. Which, according to "AI" fanatics, would now be automated by "AI".
- emp17344 1y ago
  The economy is not zero-sum. That’s just a fact. Go ahead, cite something to back up your claim.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    If you want to discuss the "dismal science" in one-liners, you won't get anywhere.
    - emp17344 1y ago
      I’ve provided a source. You haven’t.
- andy99 1y ago
  The real answer is that administrative overhead will expand to fill any jobs displaced by AI. There's no danger of net job loss, just a higher percentage of bullshit jobs. > he had to take a job in the patent office Do you have any idea how much a patent clerk makes
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > Perhaps physical inventions have been somewhat exhausted? I vividly remember hearing this from a group of elderly adults when I was around maybe 8 years old. I remember being very sad that I missed it: The good times of the economy, the period where all the cool things were invented, the “good times” that were being ruined by all of this new technology that the elderly people thought were against the natural way of how things should be. And it’s always wild to me that I see the same fallacies repeated on HN, inevitably by people who are also convinced that the good times are about to end and all of this new-fangled technology stuff is evil because they just figured out how the world worked in their middle age years and now it’s all changing in ways they find scary.
autobodie 1y ago
Literally trickle-down economics.
elliotto 1y ago
This is true under an economic system that appropriately distributes the fruits of economic production to workers; perhaps one that existed in the post-ww2 to neoliberal era. But it is untrue under a rentier / technofeudal / oligarch economy, in which all excess profits are captured by a cabal of the owner class. Which of these states describes the modern economy is a political exercise.
- emp17344 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - goatlover 1y ago
    We're headed in that direction. Why do you think the tech billionaires have been aligning themselves with the Project 2025 architects and Trump?
  - elliotto 1y ago
    I would encourage you to read books like Varoufakis' Technofeudalism and Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. The distribution of wealth and capture of profits has changed significantly and no longer resembles the economic environment of previous generations.
  - tomhow 1y ago
    > Laughably false. Please edit out swipes like this from comments on HN.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
viccis 1y ago
Economics is a pseudo-science typically used to launder political ideology, but this "fallacy" is particularly ill suited to this discussion. Yes, it's true that automation doesn't necessarily cause a net unemployment across the board to go up. But it can still decimate employment in the automated sectors. From that link: >While many workers fear that automation or artificial intelligence will take their jobs, history has shown that when jobs in some sectors disappear, jobs in new sectors are created. One example is the United States, where a century of increasing productivity and technological improvements changed the percentage of Americans employed in the production of food from 41% of the workforce in 1900 to 2% in 2000. The problem with AI is that it tends to automate away skilled jobs, ones that sometimes required many years of study and educational debt to get. So the net result, with respect to software engineering, which was the context of the discussion is here, is not "job creation." The net result is that people (especially the junior ones who just got out of school with a pile of debt) are now forced to compete for jobs they aren't necessary any more qualified for than people without those degrees. This applies to other things where AI massively reduces the number of people needed. Journalism, art asset creation, etc. These are the kinds of cushy and often fulfilling jobs that are only possible because our grandparents and their parents, and so on, worked backbreaking or mind numbing jobs to build the kind of economy that would support these kind of careers. Thanks AI! My kid might never have to worry about the horrors of creative engineering or artistic careers, freeing up room for the real joy of being a gig economy slave or a factory shift worker!
- emp17344 1y ago
  >Economics is a pseudo-science typically used to launder political ideology This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard on here. Perfect example of conspiratorial thinking. Automation has always resulted in economic growth. This time will be no different.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Economics is inherently tied to politics, and economic theory is merely created to satisfy various political desires. Our economic understanding is inherently limited to just capitalism. That's all we know, and our theories are constrained within that environment. However, throughout human history there have been a plethora of economies that operated under different rules. > Automation has always resulted in economic growth This, while true, does not mean that further automation will result in economic growth. For example, under a capitalist economy, 100% automation results in the entire economy collapsing. Because the economy is predicated on consumerism, which requires employment. In order to produce things, you need people to buy them. Seems simple, but it's a huge problem with capitalism that we repeatedly bandaid. Obviously, we can't let people who can't work just rot in the street, because that's unpleasant. So we develop systems like disability, Medicaid, Social Security, education, etc to bolt-on top of capitalism to fill in the gaps. We are completely and utterly not prepared for extreme automation.
woopsn 1y ago
To be fair the firm's goal is, explicitly, to "replace most economically valuable labor".
gorpy7 1y ago
I always get a little triggered when i hear the phrase job creation. it’s like a solution in search of a problem. here idk if you’re using it in the way i usually hear it because i generally agree -productivity gains boost the economy. for me, i wish the focus was on value creation. i think of the economy like a bike, the slower it goes the harder it is to balance. i come from a biology background and there there is ‘boom bust’ as a widespread and normal process. if humans are clever enough, even when we run out of resources and are about to bust, we can just suddenly invent fertilizer or countless other things. we took natural gas and added value to it. humans have lots of tricks to keep the bicycle chooching along. Regarding ai, it’s a systemic change. most people aren’t great at systems thinking because most people are specialists. so it’s not too likely you’ll hear a salient take on what ai will do despite some rather smart people commenting. The one trend i like to look at is sort of a scale reset or, how do you say forest from the trees? what i mean is, one of corporate’s great advantages are their size and swath of roles and the coordination that allows them to have an outsized advantage-essentially leveraging the collection of specialist to gain a dominate effect in working ‘the system’(navigating government, economy or scale, overwhelming capital, etc). Enter AI, subsuming these roles into one thing and sort of resetting the required scale to have some of the corporate power/advantages. Of course these are some rosy shades but i often approach new things with “what’s the best that could happen” and it has served me well.
tom_m 1y ago
Yea, I believed that for a while and still do...but we're going to go through a rough patch first. There's a bunch of people who don't understand how this works and are looking for a get rich quick scheme. Very lazy people. They're going to further devalue employees and expect unrealistic outcomes. It's going to take some time here before people learn how AI fits into the every day and along the way there's going to be some wild stuff. I also expect there to be a very very strong addiction or cult-like behavior. Mental health will suffer as well. Very dangerous times.
goatlover 1y ago
Productivity gains also boost wealth inequality. Too much wealth inequality has negative effects on democracy and society in general. AI has the possibility of making the tech billionaires far more wealthy and influential.
TFYS 1y ago
They boost the economy if there exist enough mechanisms that spread the generated gains to everyone. Those mechanisms used to be unions, political power of the working class and the demand for labor. The first two are close to nonexistant now, and the third one is being eroded at an increasing speed. The closer to human abilities automation gets, the less room there is for new human jobs to be created. At some point any new job invented can also be done by an AI, and at that point productivity gains have no mechanism with which to spread into the economy. At that point the owners of the machines will get everything they want from them and they'll have no need to pay other humans anything.
satiated_grue 1y ago
"The economy" (GDP) being boosted is very unevenly distributed. Are the jobs created good jobs - that pay decently, and that people want to do?
xela79 1y ago
uncontrolled productivity gains that don't feed the added value of that extra productivity back into the system is failed. you end up with the 0.1% having all the money. hmmm... wonder what country has this balance.

fallingknife 1y ago

Given how much better employees have it now than before all the productivity gains of recent history, the only question I have about the economic system is how can we get more of that?

heavyset_go 1y ago

At the same time, there's a reason machine-breaking was made a capital crime 200 years ago. I'd argue that people drawing their ire upon the tools of their oppression is a step in the right direction towards class consciousness.

xela79 1y ago

> The fact that productivity gains are bad for employees (labour vs capital) should raise significant questions about the economic systems that we have in place. yup, exact same argument was made against installing these machines on the product lines instead of having 20 people there. the problem is not the machine, it's the never ending uncontrolled capitalism of being seeing as a failing company, if your productivity and benefits don't growth year after year. If they stay stagnant? failed company.