3 ms·

I think the current debate is less about whether automation happens and more about where the gains go

by veunes 10mo ago

Ajedi32 10mo ago
The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes. The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.
- Arkhaine_kupo 10mo ago
  > The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago access to housing is incredibly expensive. Measuring their purchasing power for how many scented candles they can buy is pretty meaningless when they are much closer to homelessness than ever before.
  - Ajedi32 10mo ago
    Land is one thing you can't automate the production of, and construction still consists mostly of manual skilled labor. But I think despite that you'll find housing today still compares very favorably to housing 100 years ago (in terms of median square footage, safety, amenities, etc).
  - jlawson 10mo ago
    This is actually _because_ automation has been so effective. It's called Baumol's cost disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- int_19h 10mo ago
  > The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes. The people who are "automated away" and have reduced income are also less of a consumer. In a society where most jobs are automated, who are the consumers?
  - Ajedi32 10mo ago
    You've spent your whole life living in a society where that's already happened. 1000 years ago nearly everyone was employed in agriculture. Now nearly all those jobs are automated. So you tell me: where are the consumers? Why aren't we all unemployed and unable to afford to buy anything now that those agriculture jobs have been automated away? Or did we find other productive activities to spend our time on?
    - program_whiz 10mo ago
      This sentiment is constantly echoed on this site -- "just look at past times where tech removed jobs, this is no different". But the difference now is that we will soon have super-humans in terms of intelligence, dexterity (robots), and cost (cheaper, no healthcare, etc.). I put the onus on the yay-sayers, can you name a job that a human can do that this new AI / robot cannot (or will not soon) do? Otherwise, I think its time to stop drawing false equivalence with agriculture, luddites, etc. Those were "narrow" machines, incapable of coding, writing a symphony, or working in a factory. In the next decade we're talking about building a better human. I think a better example is to draw a parallel to horses. There is nothing left for them to do; we keep a few around for sport and entertainment, as a novelty. At one time, they were indispensible, but there's no rule that any organism (including humans) has infinite economically viable uses. At some point, everything worth doing (economically) might be automated to the point that human labor no longer makes sense (and hence we have high unemployment). There is no cosmic law written that "if jobs are replaced by tech, new jobs shall fill the space!" Just look at areas in the rust belt where literally nothing replaced the lost jobs -- there is just rampant unemployment, black market dealing / drugs, and despair.
      - Ajedi32 10mo ago
        That's a very different argument about a hypothetical future problem that may or may not ever actually materialize. (I'd argue given the current trajectory of AI it probably won't for the foreseeable future.) But yes, if we develop artificial superinteligence to the level where humans become literally useless (e.g. we don't just automate 90% of everything, but 100%, and there's actually no tasks left in the world that humans can do better or cheaper than computers) then assuming humanity survives we'll need a different economic system for distributing the nearly-unlimited resources resulting from that. Probably in that situation the best thing to do would be to ask the AI to design our new economic system, since it would obviously do a better job at that than any human.

I think the current debate is less about whether automation happens and more about where the gains go

by veunes 10mo ago

I think the current debate is less about whether automation happens and more about where the gains go

The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes. The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.

Arkhaine_kupo 10mo ago
> The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago access to housing is incredibly expensive. Measuring their purchasing power for how many scented candles they can buy is pretty meaningless when they are much closer to homelessness than ever before.
- Ajedi32 10mo ago
  Land is one thing you can't automate the production of, and construction still consists mostly of manual skilled labor. But I think despite that you'll find housing today still compares very favorably to housing 100 years ago (in terms of median square footage, safety, amenities, etc).
- jlawson 10mo ago
  This is actually _because_ automation has been so effective. It's called Baumol's cost disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
int_19h 10mo ago
> The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes. The people who are "automated away" and have reduced income are also less of a consumer. In a society where most jobs are automated, who are the consumers?
- Ajedi32 10mo ago
  You've spent your whole life living in a society where that's already happened. 1000 years ago nearly everyone was employed in agriculture. Now nearly all those jobs are automated. So you tell me: where are the consumers? Why aren't we all unemployed and unable to afford to buy anything now that those agriculture jobs have been automated away? Or did we find other productive activities to spend our time on?
  - program_whiz 10mo ago
    This sentiment is constantly echoed on this site -- "just look at past times where tech removed jobs, this is no different". But the difference now is that we will soon have super-humans in terms of intelligence, dexterity (robots), and cost (cheaper, no healthcare, etc.). I put the onus on the yay-sayers, can you name a job that a human can do that this new AI / robot cannot (or will not soon) do? Otherwise, I think its time to stop drawing false equivalence with agriculture, luddites, etc. Those were "narrow" machines, incapable of coding, writing a symphony, or working in a factory. In the next decade we're talking about building a better human. I think a better example is to draw a parallel to horses. There is nothing left for them to do; we keep a few around for sport and entertainment, as a novelty. At one time, they were indispensible, but there's no rule that any organism (including humans) has infinite economically viable uses. At some point, everything worth doing (economically) might be automated to the point that human labor no longer makes sense (and hence we have high unemployment). There is no cosmic law written that "if jobs are replaced by tech, new jobs shall fill the space!" Just look at areas in the rust belt where literally nothing replaced the lost jobs -- there is just rampant unemployment, black market dealing / drugs, and despair.
    - Ajedi32 10mo ago
      That's a very different argument about a hypothetical future problem that may or may not ever actually materialize. (I'd argue given the current trajectory of AI it probably won't for the foreseeable future.) But yes, if we develop artificial superinteligence to the level where humans become literally useless (e.g. we don't just automate 90% of everything, but 100%, and there's actually no tasks left in the world that humans can do better or cheaper than computers) then assuming humanity survives we'll need a different economic system for distributing the nearly-unlimited resources resulting from that. Probably in that situation the best thing to do would be to ask the AI to design our new economic system, since it would obviously do a better job at that than any human.