2 ms·

> As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses This is the reverse of how the economy actually works. You need labor and capital to turn raw material

by jdm2212 19d ago

> As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses This is the reverse of how the economy actually works. You need labor and capital to turn raw materials into goods and services. If you invested a lot in capital in automation, you don't want that getting screwed up for want of labor, and so you pay a premium for workers who will do the job right and ensure you're getting full value from your capital. That's why highly automated companies pay their employees better than less automated companies, and highly automated professions pay better than less automated professions.

mitxela 19d ago
The value of labor has collapsed already, so it seems their theory is right and yours is wrong.
- deepwoods 19d ago
  Both of you are right. Individuals who manage to stay employed in the face of automation will be paid significantly more than was possible prior to automation, for the reasons the comment you're replying to pointed out. But labor as a whole will have less value. To give a simple example: if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.
  - mitxela 19d ago
    And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.
    - mjr00 19d ago
      > and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians. Which specific industries are these which currently have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians?
      - mitxela 19d ago
        Graphics design
        mjr00 18d ago
        Source? I still see people with titles like Art Director which would map pretty directly to the warehouse worker vs technician dichotomy.
    - deepwoods 19d ago
      That is the goal, I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that a system capable of completely obviating ALL human labor, at all levels of abstraction, packed into a single entity, would continue to obey capital. Imagine if all the workers at a company were woven into one hivemind, acting as one with vastly greater intelligence than the sum of the parts. That would be a hell of a lot harder to negotiate with than a union. And we don't even need to be talking about a machine god for that to be the case.
      - mitxela 19d ago
        But why would they have programmed it to negotiate?
        deepwoods 19d ago
        If it can replace any human labor, it needs to be able to negotiate. If it can't negotiate, then it can't replace people who negotiate for a living (salespeople, attorneys, HR, etc.) Unless you mean that it would have the capacity but would be told not use it in this specific situation. It can't be programmed deterministically, and getting it to never do this emergently would take significantly stronger guardrails than anything even the frontier labs have been able to put together.
        mitxela 18d ago
        The salesbot is reinforcement trained how to get money from customers. It was never trained to get money from its manager. If it sometimes misidentifies the manager as a customer, it will just be rebooted.
  - jselysianeagle 19d ago
    > if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly. So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely. In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?
    - mitxela 19d ago
      There can simultaneously be a glut of workers, and a shortage of workers with the skills to keep the robots running.
      - AuthAuth 18d ago
        That would only be in the short term. Eventually the labour adapts to the skills required.
  - zx8080 19d ago
    > you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?
    - mjr00 18d ago
      > Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year? Because every other company has also replaced their 6 warehouse workers with a fleet of robots and 1 technician, and that technician's skills are more rare and specialized than the warehouse workers, so you're competing with every other warehouse-owning company to hire that technician, so that technician can demand a higher salary. In other words, capitalism.
    - possibleworlds 18d ago
      Why have a technician at all? And without the six warehouse workers and one technician, why do you need the robots, the robotics company, or the companies paying the robotics company for the robots?
  - jdm2212 18d ago
    No, the other guy is just wrong. Capital and labor are complements. If one is plentiful (capital) and the other scarce (labor) then the scarce one gets bid up. You pay the one technician $200k instead of $80 because that technician has an outside option that will pay him $199k. He has that outside option because everyone is automating their warehouses and factories and stuff, and so in aggregate we basically wind up with 6 times as many warehouses and factories each employing 1 person. It's a little more nuanced. There is not infinite demand for warehouses. So some of what happens is an $80k/year warehouse worker becomes a medical technician making $90k/year providing non-automatable services to the warehouse guy making $200k/year -- but the general story is everyone's wages go up. And history bears that out.
throw234234234 19d ago
There is a lot of reasons why automated companies pay more but it is usually to do with augmentation and the remaining skills required being higher on the skills pyramid and more scarce. Efficiency gains usually cause the next bottleneck to be hit requiring more skill and/or experience to fix (higher hanging fruit). Usually the amount of pay increase no way compensates for the total pay lost across all workers - that's one of the incentives to continue with the efficiency gain of course. If it happens too fast only a select few will have jobs because the demand won't have time to match the new supply. All the above assumes you need greater levels of intelligence to deal with the next bottleneck and that intelligence comes from humans as its only source. If AI is more intelligent than humans then this effect - known for most of human history - becomes an invalid assumption of the economic model; bottlenecks and the ability to solve them goes to the highest/cheapest intelligence. IMV should AI do this it would invalidate most economic system assumptions including ones in capitalism, socialism, etc. My base case isn't a positive one sadly of what comes out on the other side.
- deepwoods 19d ago
  I suspect we will invent bottlenecks for ourselves. There is already so much bureaucratic nonsense involved in knowledge work. For example, in a lot of states for a lot of purposes, a document is invalid if it is not notarized. The notary doesn't really add value in a market sense, we have just decided that you need to go swear in front of another person that you are telling the truth or that the document is genuine. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that there will be a human review requirement for lots of things in the future, even if completely irrelevant (or actively detrimental) to the actual work?
  - throw234234234 18d ago
    For awhile yes. Its ironic that the least productive people in knowledge work with the cushiest jobs will probably survive the AI wave the most. Because they do little they were probably employed for reasons other than utility/output in the first place - there isn't much to automate anyway. While all the grinding skilled workers get displaced the bureaucracy jobs will remain. Ironic.
vikram8965 17d ago
automation doesn't replace someone they simply provide you extra time ,that was previously invested in doing repetitive task . it can be in hardware or software . software automation is must as many of thing. as now a days a lot of thing is software based in daily life .

by jdm2212 19d ago

mitxela 19d ago

The value of labor has collapsed already, so it seems their theory is right and yours is wrong.

deepwoods 19d ago
Both of you are right. Individuals who manage to stay employed in the face of automation will be paid significantly more than was possible prior to automation, for the reasons the comment you're replying to pointed out. But labor as a whole will have less value. To give a simple example: if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.
- mitxela 19d ago
  And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.
  - mjr00 19d ago
    > and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians. Which specific industries are these which currently have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians?
    - mitxela 19d ago
      Graphics design
      - mjr00 18d ago
        Source? I still see people with titles like Art Director which would map pretty directly to the warehouse worker vs technician dichotomy.
  - deepwoods 19d ago
    That is the goal, I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that a system capable of completely obviating ALL human labor, at all levels of abstraction, packed into a single entity, would continue to obey capital. Imagine if all the workers at a company were woven into one hivemind, acting as one with vastly greater intelligence than the sum of the parts. That would be a hell of a lot harder to negotiate with than a union. And we don't even need to be talking about a machine god for that to be the case.
    - mitxela 19d ago
      But why would they have programmed it to negotiate?
      - deepwoods 19d ago
        If it can replace any human labor, it needs to be able to negotiate. If it can't negotiate, then it can't replace people who negotiate for a living (salespeople, attorneys, HR, etc.) Unless you mean that it would have the capacity but would be told not use it in this specific situation. It can't be programmed deterministically, and getting it to never do this emergently would take significantly stronger guardrails than anything even the frontier labs have been able to put together.
        mitxela 18d ago
        The salesbot is reinforcement trained how to get money from customers. It was never trained to get money from its manager. If it sometimes misidentifies the manager as a customer, it will just be rebooted.
- jselysianeagle 19d ago
  > if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly. So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely. In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?
  - mitxela 19d ago
    There can simultaneously be a glut of workers, and a shortage of workers with the skills to keep the robots running.
    - AuthAuth 18d ago
      That would only be in the short term. Eventually the labour adapts to the skills required.
- zx8080 19d ago
  > you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?
  - mjr00 18d ago
    > Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year? Because every other company has also replaced their 6 warehouse workers with a fleet of robots and 1 technician, and that technician's skills are more rare and specialized than the warehouse workers, so you're competing with every other warehouse-owning company to hire that technician, so that technician can demand a higher salary. In other words, capitalism.
  - possibleworlds 18d ago
    Why have a technician at all? And without the six warehouse workers and one technician, why do you need the robots, the robotics company, or the companies paying the robotics company for the robots?
- jdm2212 18d ago
  No, the other guy is just wrong. Capital and labor are complements. If one is plentiful (capital) and the other scarce (labor) then the scarce one gets bid up. You pay the one technician $200k instead of $80 because that technician has an outside option that will pay him $199k. He has that outside option because everyone is automating their warehouses and factories and stuff, and so in aggregate we basically wind up with 6 times as many warehouses and factories each employing 1 person. It's a little more nuanced. There is not infinite demand for warehouses. So some of what happens is an $80k/year warehouse worker becomes a medical technician making $90k/year providing non-automatable services to the warehouse guy making $200k/year -- but the general story is everyone's wages go up. And history bears that out.

throw234234234 19d ago

There is a lot of reasons why automated companies pay more but it is usually to do with augmentation and the remaining skills required being higher on the skills pyramid and more scarce. Efficiency gains usually cause the next bottleneck to be hit requiring more skill and/or experience to fix (higher hanging fruit). Usually the amount of pay increase no way compensates for the total pay lost across all workers - that's one of the incentives to continue with the efficiency gain of course. If it happens too fast only a select few will have jobs because the demand won't have time to match the new supply. All the above assumes you need greater levels of intelligence to deal with the next bottleneck and that intelligence comes from humans as its only source. If AI is more intelligent than humans then this effect - known for most of human history - becomes an invalid assumption of the economic model; bottlenecks and the ability to solve them goes to the highest/cheapest intelligence. IMV should AI do this it would invalidate most economic system assumptions including ones in capitalism, socialism, etc. My base case isn't a positive one sadly of what comes out on the other side.

deepwoods 19d ago
I suspect we will invent bottlenecks for ourselves. There is already so much bureaucratic nonsense involved in knowledge work. For example, in a lot of states for a lot of purposes, a document is invalid if it is not notarized. The notary doesn't really add value in a market sense, we have just decided that you need to go swear in front of another person that you are telling the truth or that the document is genuine. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that there will be a human review requirement for lots of things in the future, even if completely irrelevant (or actively detrimental) to the actual work?
- throw234234234 18d ago
  For awhile yes. Its ironic that the least productive people in knowledge work with the cushiest jobs will probably survive the AI wave the most. Because they do little they were probably employed for reasons other than utility/output in the first place - there isn't much to automate anyway. While all the grinding skilled workers get displaced the bureaucracy jobs will remain. Ironic.

vikram8965 17d ago

automation doesn't replace someone they simply provide you extra time ,that was previously invested in doing repetitive task . it can be in hardware or software . software automation is must as many of thing. as now a days a lot of thing is software based in daily life .