6 ms·

if everything gets replaced by bots, how will the economy run given that much of it is because of employees getting paid and in turn spending that money?

Roritharr 11y ago
More Bullshit Jobs.
- jqm 11y ago
  Indeed. That is the answer.
manigandham 11y ago
This is a major question that has no real answer but can potentially be a big problem. Robots and "the future" are great and all but what is in store for a society that has no work/purpose to do? Some of this stuff I feel requires a closer look with regulation and maybe some checks in morality and weighing what's the greater good. CGP Grey had a decent video explaining some of the points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
DannoHung 11y ago
They'll start figuring out ways to kill people or otherwise prevent the next generation of non-capitalist class people from being born. Compulsory sterilization for those unable to fulfill the needs of their children is a thing even today. Well, that or we could destroy capitalism as we know it. But only dirty socialists want that to happen here on Hacker News.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I'm prefer the term "proud socialist".
  - alphapapa 11y ago
    How is that something to be proud of? In ancient times (only a few hundred years ago, actually), peasants were ruled by kings and nobles. They owned next to nothing. They couldn't choose to change jobs or careers, couldn't choose to move to another place. It wasn't just difficult to find opportunity and turn it into prosperity--it was not allowed. Then a few people decided that human beings had innate, individual worth, and that no one person was better or more important than any other. They realized that people should be able to determine their own destiny. They realized that no one sitting in an ivory tower or behind a desk should be able to rubber-stamp someone else's life out of existence. So now we have constitutions and democracies and capitalism. It's not perfect--people are still greedy and power-hungry--but it's a million times better than it used to be. Then in some parts of the world, some people got the idea that the nebulous idea of the greater good outweighed what was good for any one person--the "greater good" being determined by a few intellectuals or bureaucrats--and that individual rights were rightfully trumped by the rubber-stamp of a government wonk. As a result, tens of millions of people were stamped out of existence, and millions died fighting wars over it. Some of those governments failed, while others linger to this day. And yet, there are still people today who want to take us back into the dark ages, where a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk can tell you where to work, where to live, whether your illness is worthy of healthcare, whether you're eligible to live or die, whether you're allowed to have a family, whether you're allowed to seek a better education... What is wrong with you?! Someone needs to put together a multi-volume set of horror stories from those who have lived under communist and socialist rule. But even that probably wouldn't convince these leftists that it's a bad idea, because they always think, "Yeah, but we can get it right This Time." As if human beings--the ones who comprise the government--have changed for the better. The arrogance and hubris is off-the-charts, always thinking that they know how to fix the systems that have allowed the evil impulses of humans to flourish and slaughter millions of innocent people. Maybe we should buy a few islands, throw them together, and let them fight it out to make their utopias. After a few decades, they'd be ready for freedom again.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      I said socialist, not communist. I never suggest removing capitalism; I do suggest regulation and a strong safety net, which includes such things as universal healthcare and perhaps so far as a basic income as automation continues to remove the need for jobs.
Qantourisc 11y ago
Well at this point "labour" is free. The only logical solution I see at this point is basically communism. The only work left will be politics/ethics. But politics is what we should replace first in my opinion :D Side effect of free labour: prices going down a lot.
- adventured 11y ago
  No the labor isn't free, it's extremely expensive: R&D, installation, maintenance, replacement, operation, electricity, shelter, transport, insurance. There will never be a scenario under any circumstances in which labor is free. It rests on a principle that guarantees that: energy will never be free, nor will all the other requirements such as materials, buildings, et al.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    Compared to the cost of a human doing the same job, it's a lot closer to free than the cost of the human: Human wages for a clerical role: ~$60,000 a year. EC2 m4-10xl instance for a year: ~$13,000 The lack of a need for breaks, management, HR, bathrooms, kitchens, break rooms, lighting, HVAC, 60+ sq feet per employee... The costs for maintenance, energy and R&D are suddenly small peanuts; you can do a lot of R&D for the difference between the cost of a human and a machine.
jjoonathan 11y ago
Most interesting possibility: there will be an inflection point in the way we do production & distribution. The capital costs and inefficiencies of distributed production fall every day (internet to distribute knowledge, ever-advancing low-N fabrication technology) while the disadvantages of centralized production increase (capital is becoming more important, labor less important, meaning the average split of the proceeds is ever more extractive). At some point people on the bottom rungs will find it advantageous to work for "communes" instead of employers. Scare quotes because there's a lot of back-to-nature & peacenik baggage associated with the word "commune" that doesn't necessarily apply here -- it's just a different structure for production and employment that avoids the deleveraging effects of forcing people to compete for a spot in a shrinking global pool of jobs. The communes I'm picturing would make heavy use of industrial technology and compete against one another for people by advertising the benefits they offer vs the labor required for membership. Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market. Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem. Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  There are lots of unknowns left in this world, and lots of exploring left to do. Space, curing disease, and finding additional sources of clean water and energy are all areas that require lots of work and human ingenuity. The challenge is getting people educated to do work in these fields and allocating capital properly. The unskilled labor market was known as the illiterate labor market 100 years ago, and we overcame that challenge, lifting those people up and educating them on how to read. The same can be done again, we just need to figure out how to do so.
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    Yes, there are undiscovered future uses for labor and the capital/labor imbalance could be alleviated (or exacerbated) by discovering them. It is still utterly absurd to bind the wellbeing of our society to a gamble on the rate of discovery and the extent of these untapped resources.
Htsthbjig 11y ago
Ownership of the robots that do things. Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave. No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates. Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners. We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.
Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago
At some point, we will have to accept that a society based on the assumption that everyone should find a full-time job just doesn't make sense anymore. In Europe this is starting to become obvious, as we have high structural unemployment (very high in some countries) in spite of the jobs we keep just for the sake of it. Jobs like gas station operators or supermarket cashiers are mostly unnecessary and just kept because people boycott machines while there is unemployment, telemarketing could probably be banned altogether with everyone being the happier for it if it weren't for the loss of thousands of jobs, etc. This applies even to some intellectually-demanding jobs (not all): speaking against my own interest as professor in a small university, I often wonder if all the teaching we do is necessary when any of my neighbors with a PC is a couple of clicks away from lectures by the top professors at MIT. At the moment, the collective delusion that we need everyone to work 8 hours a day still stands, although we need more and more patches and stitches to keep it going (artificially-kept jobs, subsidies, etc.) It will soon become obvious for everyone that this has stopped being a valid paradigm, and then we will need to make some deep changes. If we don't want millions of people to starve even in fully developed countries, we will need to choose: either we all share the diminishing demand of working hours (i.e. we work significantly fewer hours a day, which is what has traditionally been done to compensate for the advances in technology) or we just accept that we don't need everyone to work and socially admit not working at all as a valid option, with a basic income. Curiously, both choices are traditionally associated with the political left (although some intelligent right-wing liberal economists, like Friedman, have embraced variants of basic income). The traditional right just doesn't seem to have an answer to this. I'm personally in favor of basic income. Reducing the working week may work for a while, but as the set of jobs where humans are competitive gets restricted to very high-skill jobs only, it just won't do. As sad as it may sound now, there will be people who won't be able to do any really necessary job better than a machine, and we will need to feed them. Basic income will become a historical inevitability sooner or later.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Or ... we let a considerable portion of humans starve to death and reduce the population
- 1971genocide 11y ago

Roritharr 11y ago

More Bullshit Jobs.

jqm 11y ago
Indeed. That is the answer.

manigandham 11y ago

This is a major question that has no real answer but can potentially be a big problem. Robots and "the future" are great and all but what is in store for a society that has no work/purpose to do? Some of this stuff I feel requires a closer look with regulation and maybe some checks in morality and weighing what's the greater good. CGP Grey had a decent video explaining some of the points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

DannoHung 11y ago

They'll start figuring out ways to kill people or otherwise prevent the next generation of non-capitalist class people from being born. Compulsory sterilization for those unable to fulfill the needs of their children is a thing even today. Well, that or we could destroy capitalism as we know it. But only dirty socialists want that to happen here on Hacker News.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
I'm prefer the term "proud socialist".
- alphapapa 11y ago
  How is that something to be proud of? In ancient times (only a few hundred years ago, actually), peasants were ruled by kings and nobles. They owned next to nothing. They couldn't choose to change jobs or careers, couldn't choose to move to another place. It wasn't just difficult to find opportunity and turn it into prosperity--it was not allowed. Then a few people decided that human beings had innate, individual worth, and that no one person was better or more important than any other. They realized that people should be able to determine their own destiny. They realized that no one sitting in an ivory tower or behind a desk should be able to rubber-stamp someone else's life out of existence. So now we have constitutions and democracies and capitalism. It's not perfect--people are still greedy and power-hungry--but it's a million times better than it used to be. Then in some parts of the world, some people got the idea that the nebulous idea of the greater good outweighed what was good for any one person--the "greater good" being determined by a few intellectuals or bureaucrats--and that individual rights were rightfully trumped by the rubber-stamp of a government wonk. As a result, tens of millions of people were stamped out of existence, and millions died fighting wars over it. Some of those governments failed, while others linger to this day. And yet, there are still people today who want to take us back into the dark ages, where a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk can tell you where to work, where to live, whether your illness is worthy of healthcare, whether you're eligible to live or die, whether you're allowed to have a family, whether you're allowed to seek a better education... What is wrong with you?! Someone needs to put together a multi-volume set of horror stories from those who have lived under communist and socialist rule. But even that probably wouldn't convince these leftists that it's a bad idea, because they always think, "Yeah, but we can get it right This Time." As if human beings--the ones who comprise the government--have changed for the better. The arrogance and hubris is off-the-charts, always thinking that they know how to fix the systems that have allowed the evil impulses of humans to flourish and slaughter millions of innocent people. Maybe we should buy a few islands, throw them together, and let them fight it out to make their utopias. After a few decades, they'd be ready for freedom again.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I said socialist, not communist. I never suggest removing capitalism; I do suggest regulation and a strong safety net, which includes such things as universal healthcare and perhaps so far as a basic income as automation continues to remove the need for jobs.

Qantourisc 11y ago

Well at this point "labour" is free. The only logical solution I see at this point is basically communism. The only work left will be politics/ethics. But politics is what we should replace first in my opinion :D Side effect of free labour: prices going down a lot.

adventured 11y ago
No the labor isn't free, it's extremely expensive: R&D, installation, maintenance, replacement, operation, electricity, shelter, transport, insurance. There will never be a scenario under any circumstances in which labor is free. It rests on a principle that guarantees that: energy will never be free, nor will all the other requirements such as materials, buildings, et al.
- falcolas 11y ago
  Compared to the cost of a human doing the same job, it's a lot closer to free than the cost of the human: Human wages for a clerical role: ~$60,000 a year. EC2 m4-10xl instance for a year: ~$13,000 The lack of a need for breaks, management, HR, bathrooms, kitchens, break rooms, lighting, HVAC, 60+ sq feet per employee... The costs for maintenance, energy and R&D are suddenly small peanuts; you can do a lot of R&D for the difference between the cost of a human and a machine.

jjoonathan 11y ago

Most interesting possibility: there will be an inflection point in the way we do production & distribution. The capital costs and inefficiencies of distributed production fall every day (internet to distribute knowledge, ever-advancing low-N fabrication technology) while the disadvantages of centralized production increase (capital is becoming more important, labor less important, meaning the average split of the proceeds is ever more extractive). At some point people on the bottom rungs will find it advantageous to work for "communes" instead of employers. Scare quotes because there's a lot of back-to-nature & peacenik baggage associated with the word "commune" that doesn't necessarily apply here -- it's just a different structure for production and employment that avoids the deleveraging effects of forcing people to compete for a spot in a shrinking global pool of jobs. The communes I'm picturing would make heavy use of industrial technology and compete against one another for people by advertising the benefits they offer vs the labor required for membership. Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market. Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem. Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.

bsbechtel 11y ago
There are lots of unknowns left in this world, and lots of exploring left to do. Space, curing disease, and finding additional sources of clean water and energy are all areas that require lots of work and human ingenuity. The challenge is getting people educated to do work in these fields and allocating capital properly. The unskilled labor market was known as the illiterate labor market 100 years ago, and we overcame that challenge, lifting those people up and educating them on how to read. The same can be done again, we just need to figure out how to do so.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  Yes, there are undiscovered future uses for labor and the capital/labor imbalance could be alleviated (or exacerbated) by discovering them. It is still utterly absurd to bind the wellbeing of our society to a gamble on the rate of discovery and the extent of these untapped resources.

Htsthbjig 11y ago

Ownership of the robots that do things. Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave. No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates. Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners. We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.

Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago

At some point, we will have to accept that a society based on the assumption that everyone should find a full-time job just doesn't make sense anymore. In Europe this is starting to become obvious, as we have high structural unemployment (very high in some countries) in spite of the jobs we keep just for the sake of it. Jobs like gas station operators or supermarket cashiers are mostly unnecessary and just kept because people boycott machines while there is unemployment, telemarketing could probably be banned altogether with everyone being the happier for it if it weren't for the loss of thousands of jobs, etc. This applies even to some intellectually-demanding jobs (not all): speaking against my own interest as professor in a small university, I often wonder if all the teaching we do is necessary when any of my neighbors with a PC is a couple of clicks away from lectures by the top professors at MIT. At the moment, the collective delusion that we need everyone to work 8 hours a day still stands, although we need more and more patches and stitches to keep it going (artificially-kept jobs, subsidies, etc.) It will soon become obvious for everyone that this has stopped being a valid paradigm, and then we will need to make some deep changes. If we don't want millions of people to starve even in fully developed countries, we will need to choose: either we all share the diminishing demand of working hours (i.e. we work significantly fewer hours a day, which is what has traditionally been done to compensate for the advances in technology) or we just accept that we don't need everyone to work and socially admit not working at all as a valid option, with a basic income. Curiously, both choices are traditionally associated with the political left (although some intelligent right-wing liberal economists, like Friedman, have embraced variants of basic income). The traditional right just doesn't seem to have an answer to this. I'm personally in favor of basic income. Reducing the working week may work for a while, but as the set of jobs where humans are competitive gets restricted to very high-skill jobs only, it just won't do. As sad as it may sound now, there will be people who won't be able to do any really necessary job better than a machine, and we will need to feed them. Basic income will become a historical inevitability sooner or later.

SixSigma 11y ago
Or ... we let a considerable portion of humans starve to death and reduce the population
1971genocide 11y ago