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And it is a near-infinite performance multiplier. Every driverless car is very useful work being done without anyone having to do work, besides maintain the thi

by zanny 12y ago

And it is a near-infinite performance multiplier. Every driverless car is very useful work being done without anyone having to do work, besides maintain the thing. And Tesla is leading the way with repair facilities that are almost completely automated themselves, and when you have autonomous vehicles capable of driving around other defective goods to automated factories for repair, it becomes even more profound. Every worker replaced by a robot is tremendous productivity gains for the economy. Or, moreso, for their boss. The sooner we accept that many people will soon be unemployable, and that is a good thing, the sooner we can move on with our society and not need to try forming unions to prevent progress out of fear of jobs that have no reason to exist and thus are a drain on everything.

zzzeek 12y ago
you have to solve the "unemployable people" problem first, before you take away unions. Unions at the very least serve to slow the process of worker replacement so that technological changes don't thrust large masses at once into instant poverty, which has its own negative effects on the economy.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  I don't think giving people useless jobs is superior to letting more efficient tech replace them. Instead of just wasting a potential efficiency gain, the government could use a part of the gains to either give the resources to workers directly or spend on training and education. Anyway, there are plently of useful things you could do with workers besides just wasting the efficiency gain.
  - krschultz 12y ago
    When did being a trained auto mechanic become a 'useless job'? It's easy to hand waive away all this work as bullshit, but so is most of software development. Yes we want to figure out how to make it more productive, but completely eliminating jobs and making people unemployed has a huge negative cost. When you have someone working FT they are growing their productivity through experience, plus training, plus any process improvements. If they are unemployed, their productivity is atrophying away. The difference between slowly transitioning from one role to another and just getting cast aside as unemployed is profound.
    - darkmighty 12y ago
      I hadn't seen the degrading skills side, so good point -- perhaps a little cushion is due. But it would be even better to instead spend the freed resources to train them to do a more demanded job (yea I didn't mean useless, just not-demanded), assign them into related government jobs, or other skill-conserving tasks!
  - abakker 12y ago
    Who pays for those "plenty of useful things"? Since we don't want to pay higher taxes, the government can't do it, since we don't want to make our infrastructure, national parks, etc into for profit companies, neither can they. A big problem with all of this free labor thats becomes available, is you need another company or the government to hire them to do something, the money has to come from somewhere.
    - darkmighty 12y ago
      The increase in efficiency adds to the economy: taking a taxi example, the taxi company doesn't have to pay workers anymore, so those resources are freed. The government could simply tax a large part of that freed income (but not all of it of course) and use that to train the workers. The government doesn't even need to tax the resources directly, it can confidently pay assistance to the workers by increasing taxes anywhere since the economy essentially increased in value "globally".
      - abakker 12y ago
        An increase in efficiency only leads to an economic benefit if the aggregate demand can go up...freed resources would be a balancing act in this case. Is the marginal reduction in cost of a taxi worth the loss of all the earnings and expenditure of that person? Probably not, since not every dollar saved ever gets spent, while a person has a necessary level of consumption. Things have to be significantly more efficient to offset the loss of jobs. The worker after all is suddenly saddled with being negatively valuable, in that he has to continue to meet his living expenses, and has to be retrained, either at the cost of his employer, himself, or the government OR he can go on welfare.
        darkmighty 12y ago
        Note that this argument only applies to skilled workers; taxi divers are not highly skilled.
rrmm 12y ago
Robots cost money to build and maintain. Eventually if enough people are displaced from their jobs by their use, the cost of labor will drop. At some point it will make it cheaper to employ people, than use robots for a given task. (That assumes that these people aren't used for something else considered to be useful for society: Consider the people who were displaced by using the computer to automate calculation or telephone operators. Basically, if robots cause mass unemployment in the long term people will become cheap).
- msandford 12y ago
  I get really riled up when people are simultaneously cheering the low interest rate environment that we have and lamenting the decline of employment here in the US. At 1% interest a $1mm robot costs about $4.5k/mo on a 20 year note. At 6% it's $7k and at 10% it's nearly $10k. When interest costs are so negligible it's very hard to justify hiring people and having to deal with all the regulations regarding employment. That might be another $500/mo or more and then there are benefits on top of that. I'm not necessarily anti-regulation but I think a better statement would be pro-simplification. Don't eliminate protections for workers but do make it easy to comply by systematically refactoring the laws to get say 90% of the desired effect with substantially less words, statutes and loopholes. Further, get the interest rate up to something approaching reasonable. Yeah housing prices will go down and people will be under-water in houses but at least the labor market can get reasonable again. Better that people have to declare bankruptcy but have jobs to continue to live and eat than to have a great priced house and no jobs to speak of. The idea that the Fed is doing a great job of managing the economy should start to look more and more like a joke if you pay attention.

by zanny 12y ago

zzzeek 12y ago

you have to solve the "unemployable people" problem first, before you take away unions. Unions at the very least serve to slow the process of worker replacement so that technological changes don't thrust large masses at once into instant poverty, which has its own negative effects on the economy.

darkmighty 12y ago
I don't think giving people useless jobs is superior to letting more efficient tech replace them. Instead of just wasting a potential efficiency gain, the government could use a part of the gains to either give the resources to workers directly or spend on training and education. Anyway, there are plently of useful things you could do with workers besides just wasting the efficiency gain.
- krschultz 12y ago
  When did being a trained auto mechanic become a 'useless job'? It's easy to hand waive away all this work as bullshit, but so is most of software development. Yes we want to figure out how to make it more productive, but completely eliminating jobs and making people unemployed has a huge negative cost. When you have someone working FT they are growing their productivity through experience, plus training, plus any process improvements. If they are unemployed, their productivity is atrophying away. The difference between slowly transitioning from one role to another and just getting cast aside as unemployed is profound.
  - darkmighty 12y ago
    I hadn't seen the degrading skills side, so good point -- perhaps a little cushion is due. But it would be even better to instead spend the freed resources to train them to do a more demanded job (yea I didn't mean useless, just not-demanded), assign them into related government jobs, or other skill-conserving tasks!
- abakker 12y ago
  Who pays for those "plenty of useful things"? Since we don't want to pay higher taxes, the government can't do it, since we don't want to make our infrastructure, national parks, etc into for profit companies, neither can they. A big problem with all of this free labor thats becomes available, is you need another company or the government to hire them to do something, the money has to come from somewhere.
  - darkmighty 12y ago
    The increase in efficiency adds to the economy: taking a taxi example, the taxi company doesn't have to pay workers anymore, so those resources are freed. The government could simply tax a large part of that freed income (but not all of it of course) and use that to train the workers. The government doesn't even need to tax the resources directly, it can confidently pay assistance to the workers by increasing taxes anywhere since the economy essentially increased in value "globally".
    - abakker 12y ago
      An increase in efficiency only leads to an economic benefit if the aggregate demand can go up...freed resources would be a balancing act in this case. Is the marginal reduction in cost of a taxi worth the loss of all the earnings and expenditure of that person? Probably not, since not every dollar saved ever gets spent, while a person has a necessary level of consumption. Things have to be significantly more efficient to offset the loss of jobs. The worker after all is suddenly saddled with being negatively valuable, in that he has to continue to meet his living expenses, and has to be retrained, either at the cost of his employer, himself, or the government OR he can go on welfare.
      - darkmighty 12y ago
        Note that this argument only applies to skilled workers; taxi divers are not highly skilled.

rrmm 12y ago

Robots cost money to build and maintain. Eventually if enough people are displaced from their jobs by their use, the cost of labor will drop. At some point it will make it cheaper to employ people, than use robots for a given task. (That assumes that these people aren't used for something else considered to be useful for society: Consider the people who were displaced by using the computer to automate calculation or telephone operators. Basically, if robots cause mass unemployment in the long term people will become cheap).

msandford 12y ago
I get really riled up when people are simultaneously cheering the low interest rate environment that we have and lamenting the decline of employment here in the US. At 1% interest a $1mm robot costs about $4.5k/mo on a 20 year note. At 6% it's $7k and at 10% it's nearly $10k. When interest costs are so negligible it's very hard to justify hiring people and having to deal with all the regulations regarding employment. That might be another $500/mo or more and then there are benefits on top of that. I'm not necessarily anti-regulation but I think a better statement would be pro-simplification. Don't eliminate protections for workers but do make it easy to comply by systematically refactoring the laws to get say 90% of the desired effect with substantially less words, statutes and loopholes. Further, get the interest rate up to something approaching reasonable. Yeah housing prices will go down and people will be under-water in houses but at least the labor market can get reasonable again. Better that people have to declare bankruptcy but have jobs to continue to live and eat than to have a great priced house and no jobs to speak of. The idea that the Fed is doing a great job of managing the economy should start to look more and more like a joke if you pay attention.