3. At the same time, people (organization) who owns (not develops) machines will take this income.
4. People (organization) who owns more machines can more easily to buy another one.
5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer.
-. Capitalism has bugs.
In the future (my crazy thoughts):
(If machines keep getting smarter)
> More and more jobs are handled by humans, thus things like labor strike will have less and less impact on machine owners - since machines can still work for them.
(If machines are smarter than human)
> People who cannot develop machines will have no competition with machine owners, since they have machines which are smarter
(If machines can developer machines)
> Even people who can develop machines (maybe the last group of people) will be unemployed. People who own machines will have endless expansion. And people's life will be depending on how many machines they have and how advanced the machines are.
About new jobs the machine enables:
Other than machine generator/operators, most of them are entertainment which are generated needs. This portion of job looks unlikely will be replaced by machines.
But who knows.
I know my logic may be flawed and all objections with reasons are extremely welcome.
I only proposed a problem with no solution, as I cannot imagine one (and definitely not pure centralized socialism), and I like machines.
>5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer.
I'm going to go ahead and call you on that one. What you probably mean is that rich people will get a lot richer comparatively. There will be a wider gap on paper.
Those same machines have a tendency to make that paper gap more meaningless as time goes on. Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes. Even the poorest people in developed countries live lives unimaginable to the rich of the past.
The question is: Would you rather be a poor man in a rich society or a rich man in a poor one?
This isn't to say that we don't need a better token of societal value than "an hour of labor" to face our own strange future, but I don't subscribe to the "Elysium" point of view.
Totally agree, but I think the question that capitalists need to ask is given the current level of abundance in X and scarcity in Y, what should every human being be privelaged to?
When food was scarce, it would be unreasonable to think that anyone but those that produced the food were entitled. However, now that we can produce as much food as we currently can, how can we justify that some people in the world can exist in such dire straits that they must still endure hunger.
Today, we have enough abundance in key areas of human necessity that should be able to ensure that no human goes hungry ever again, yet many still do.
>>Bill Gates and I both get to ride in jet planes.
Yes, but you have to take the shuttle to the airport, check in your bags, go through security, get groped by TSA, dick around the terminal while waiting for boarding, then wait for your "zone" to board, then fight others for scarce overhead bin space. Once you land, you need to wait for your turn to get off the plane and then wait for your bags.
Bill gates does not have to do any of those things. This and similar advantages (made possible by shitloads of money) allow him to increase the income gap even further.
The point seemed to fly right over your head. Of course he realizes that the flying experience for Bill Gates is superior to that of your average coach class traveler. But the point is that they are both economically capable, in 2013, to fly in a jet that can take them across the country in a few hours. This is quite remarkable if you think about it.
Okay, expand that out a little. Bill Gates can fly into any country he wants and stay as long as he wants. Your typical coach flyer does not have that resource (visa constraints, return ticket constraints). He may have quite a few things in common with the upper-middle class but barely anything in common with the lower and poor class.
I think you're missing the point he's making. 200 years ago, it doesn't matter how rich you were - you could not travel across country in a couple hours. So the 'poor' of today are able to travel better and faster than the rich of yesterday.
Perhaps in 50 years time, everyone will travel how Bill Gates does now, and Bill Gates would travel even better. This would come about through better automation of air transport.
The argument is fairly simple: we can try to decrease the gap between Bill Gates and everyone else, or we can leave the gap where it is and focus on shifting the entire bar so far that the bottom rung of the future becomes higher than the top rung of today. This is the progressive idealist viewpoint of capitalism and stands in direct opposition to the socialist viewpoint. Historically, mixing the two together works best, and it's what we use: capitalism with high taxes. Unfortunately, localized competition for tax money is driving those taxes down and destroying the system while also using the taxes for short term and ultimately useless goals instead of long term infrastructure. In comparison, Norway is probably the country closest to 'correct' in how they are using the wealth generated from oil taxes - investing it in the positive return economy.
So each individual would be happier if they were that rich person. Obviously the other neighbours less so.
If the choice is based on whether you want the whole world richer or poorer, then it's a bit more abstract. We're built to look for relative advantage and we'll do it whether it's measured by a better stick or a nicer logo/wife/jet/body/mind. We're already in that richer society (relative to most of our forefathers), but we abstract away the improved situation and compete in any environment we find ourselves in, and are (again, in general) happy to the extent that we succeed.
I love the saying "Youth is wasted on the young". For an old person, wealth would be the opportunity to go for a run again, meet a girl, or have the energy and opportunity to try some venture again. No matter what country you live in, most will experience these things - youth, friends, love, loss, possibly children, competition, failure and success. So unless you're actually in a war situation being hunted down by a rival tribe or army, life's not bad.
Automation has never unemployed people, only persons. Specific categories of jobs are removed by automation, but these are replaced by other categories of jobs. Demand is created for the products of these jobs, and the whole machine keeps turning.
The consumer driven economy is built on artificial demand. The vast majority of 'stuff' bought is unnecessary. Without advertising and a culture that emphasises keeping up with the joneses we would see unemployment on a large scale, but our economy has adapted to fill the unemployment niches.
The real challenge is not how to prevent unemployment through automation. It is to find an alternate solution to artificially inflated demand which doesn't waste so much labor and materials producing goods and services which are strictly speaking unnecessary.
It's false to think that automation must create jobs, although it's a tautology that it does destroy/reduce parts of them.
Your argument essentially amounts to "this is how it's worked in the past (unemployed people have been able to find other categories of jobs), so it'll always work that way".
It's not automation that creates jobs, it's the incentives embedded in our socio-economic culture that create the replacement jobs for those that automation destroys.
When labor is freed up, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ it to make money. When production costs are lowered, entrepreneurs look for new ways to employ the freed up capital. This is why so many companies are hiring at the same time as they are firing. Taken at a national or global scale, the result is that labor and capital follow supply and demand curves and that adjustments to the system through automation are compensated elsewhere through economic incentives.
This isn't true, though people keep writing about it in various contexts: Babbage in the 19th C, and David Ricardo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo. The jobs people do change. No one in 1800 worked as a video-game designer or social media marketing specialist. Few people today work as farrier or milliners.
I have no idea what the book situation is like in China, but if you can, get a copy of Tyler Cowen's recent book Average Is Over.
5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer.
The entire world has been getting richer for centuries, and in the last couple decades the world has seen unprecedented wealth creation due to the fall of Communism. See Cowen, noted above, or something like Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
Things never change, until they do. Think about the extreme case, where a $10,000 machine can do any job that humans currently do, better than they do, 24 hours a day. Would the entire world find new jobs, everyone doing things that no one up until 2013 had ever done before, things that machines are still not capable of, things that are valuable to the economy? I doubt it.
At some point, the machines will win, and everyone that doesn't have the means to own machines and/or integrate them into their body is going to have a really hard time of things. Just how soon is debatable, but the way things are going I won't be surprised to see it in my lifetime.
When you assume the outcome, of course it's inevitable.
But consider: machines are still dumb. At the end of the day, someone automates the process.
If all work that is necessary for the function of life can be automated, how wonderful! But, consider the dishwasher. It saves time, but is often misused by dirty dishes going in without pre rinse and disposal. So technically the work has been automated, but parts of the work still require manual operation. But now we pay people to pre wash instead of wash.
If we make a better dishwasher that does not require pre-rinse, what happens to your argument? Is your argument that there will now be some other task, maybe loading the dishes?
Consider: washing the dishes across a town employs 1000 people. Pre-washing the rishes employs 300 people. Loading the dishes employs 100 people. The factory creating the dishwasher is automated and employs 10 people. 50 people are involved in designing and marketing the dishwasher.
We have now gone from employing 1000 people to employing 150. Those 850 people are now unemployed and must seek or create new employment. Whether they succeed is irrelevant though, the dishwashing process now needs fewer employees and economic benefit has moved from the employees to the smaller number of people creating the dishwashers.
So your argument doesn't work for a simple reason: automation (by definition) reduces the number of people required to complete a task.
It's not too far away. Many businesses are built on the idea of automating manual work now (mine included; one man shop!) .
Aside from getting in to the meta discussions here. I think automation is also an enabler as much as it also detracts from different kinds of labor.
I think it just means a temporary disruption in the short term, but a redistribution of skills in the long term.
One good example of this is one we're seeing now. It was Auto and industrial before where people had the most employment (at least as far as what had the highest quality of life).
This will (and is already) moving to technology. As it matures, it will become easier to teach and I hate to say it, but commoditize the work.
After that, money made will be based on combinations of value add not necessarily what skills you know.
At this point, you have intelligence explosion, and current economics means squat. The machine will take over the world, killing us all in the process (we're made of atoms it can use for its purposes, whatever they are).
Or it can build a paradise, if it has been programmed to do exactly that. Good luck with that, since it's not exactly easy to describe "paradise" with programmatic precision.
Yup, except why do the developers not get the income? Presumably they are selling the machines?
>4
Yes. The key with this kind of logic is to relate it to the current situation, though; people with more workers can afford even more workers. Why doesn't it all blow up now?
There is more to success than simply scale of manufacturing capability; firms need to keep ahead of competitors, keep up with technology, manage the whole stack, etc, and then they can end up controlling the whole market (at the thing they do) and having nowhere else to go because the firms in other fields have an advantage that takes something special to beat.
Also, the neat thing about capitalism is that money to buy more work is rarely the bottleneck, because you can get a capitalist to invest in your scheme (if it looks any good).
>5
The second thing (poor get poorer) does not necessarily follow. Only the people who can't do anything that machines can't do better get poor. The working poor have more buying power because the machines create more wealth for less money.
In practice, despite a lot of automation, we don't have many people unable to do anything productive; people are very much more versatile than machines (for now).
Yes, eventually the set of people who cannot do something that machines can't do better includes everyone, and everyone becomes unemployed. (Which looks pretty good, IMO; who likes working?). There are more serious problems than unemployment at this point, though.
At this point, why do you expect the machines to still be under the control of the capitalists? If the machines can do capitalism, etc better than capitalists, any wealth that ends up in the hands of an autonomous machine will eventually increase to eclipse the human capitalists as well. (And of course, meanwhile the machines are increasing in effectiveness because they are better at machine design as well).
This is called the "intelligence explosion" or "technological singularity" scenario, depending who you ask, and looks like bad news, unless we do some serious stuff to make sure the machines work to specifically benefit humanity instead of just continuing to find better and better ways to do whatever other task they were doing. (Better ways that eventually include overpowering humans militarily and melting us down for raw material).
Developers will benefit from some of the income, but won't get it all. This is because their initial benefit will draw more people into software development, which, if not coincided by an increase in demand for software engineers, will lower wages since it'll increase competition for jobs.
The poor will get poorer b/c they will have neither capital (money/development machines) and because eventually the rate of cannibalization of industries will increase over time. Software's eating the world, and that process is accelerating.
Machines alone won't be worth much more than the sum of their parts because they are mass produced and largely interchangeable, so there's a ton of competition in the market. They will still be under the control/ownership of capitalists because they won't be persons - everything that isn't a person technically has an owner.
When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again.
>They will still be under the control/ownership of capitalists because they won't be persons - everything that isn't a person technically has an owner.
>When machines do cross the barrier of deserving rights, we should reconvene and have this discussion again.
You are assuming the rule of law holds through all of this.
If an autonomous machine intelligence is capable of becoming militarily sovereign (in the sense that it becomes nontrivial to simply "arrest" or otherwise overpower), it matters little whether the rest of us think it has rights, or who nominally "owns" it.
If that machine is also able to outcompete human capitalists at wealth accumulation (assuming market holds) or human generals at military power (assuming nothing)...
And let's face it, it's not that hard for even lone smart humans to be militarily untouchable. Think cybercriminals: If today we decided that cybercriminals weren't people and were owned by the government, would the they care? No; they are sovereign through anonymity, and their legal status is not an impediment to their work. Likewise with autonomous machine intelligence.
The thought is generally good but it overshoots the solution I think in one key respect: consumer priorities. I think for this post you are conflating consumer spending with luxury spending.
If indeed there were a single minded "consumerism" that strictly identified more or less meaningless items (luxury goods) as the key consumption then I would agree.
The fact is however, "consumer driven economy" simply is distinguishing an economy that predominantly privately spends more than it publicly spends, saves or invests.
To that point, I agree that we should be automating more things to free up all of our time. I hope someday to automate food production so that it can actually come full cycle, so there is definitely something there.
But don't we already have a society that only has 2% of people working on food production? If that is considered the only non-luxury/required good, then most of us are working to get more luxuries.
The thing that most people miss is that the majority of the world doesn't operate the way the US does (including things like food production). You have to look at the system as a whole. And it is extremely destructive and inhospitable when you evaluate it objectively and holistically.
I know that the popular world-view for internet technologists is very different from that of course. I saw the Hans Rosling TED talk. I used to share the same rose-colored worldview. I also used to believe all of the propaganda put out on television.
I now know that the world we live is far more violent and dysfunctional than we are led to believe. We have very deep structural problems starting with a Social Darwinistic worldview that leads to massive inequality and waste. I believe that technology is working rather directly against all of those negative legacy factors.
And I also believe that technology is currently improving the situation and will continue to do so as things like ultra-local food and energy production aided by nanotechnology become mainstream. I also think that within about twenty years unaugmented humanity will be obsoleted by advanced, vastly superior AI, and that will eliminate the current severe problems with worldviews and social structures holding back technological advancement. I am a little worried we might run into World War III before we get those things online though.
That is certainly not the only required good, but I would argue it is the #2 behind water consumption. I also wouldn't disagree that most folks are working for more luxuries. Remember I agreed that we should be working for fewer luxuries.
The issue with food is that when you factor in everything, to include environmental impact, good sustainable food is actually very expensive. I am also including the logistics that go into food delivery and the significant amount of waste and impact it causes [1].
Food is basically a solved problem. Priority #1 is medical care IMO. Housing is expensive, but really Japanese-style closet hotels can solve that problem for ultracheap if needed (as I understand it's mostly zoning laws preventing it right now). If we can get medical care to the point where, say, the 1970s standard of care is as cheap as food is, then we're basically at post-scarcity.
People will always work; some people just want to do stuff for fun. If we can get the need for employment down to that low percentage, then we're de facto there IMO. At that point, there are several ways to fill in the missing pieces; a government-funded (or even ideally endowment-funded) basic income, food becoming a gimmick to attract customers rather than a commodity the same way water is today, the equivalent of public libraries and bookstores for housing, etc. Money probably won't be an issue in any case; if work is done by that percentage of people who want to work, they won't necessarily need a salary; I can see money being limited to a mechanism for regulating large-scale resource use.
Can someone clarify? I'm not sure what end goal the article is driving at. Are we aiming for more free time?
If that's the case, then I fail to see how automation helps. Companies have incentives to hire as few employees as possible -- it cuts down on administrative overhead, like the necessity of sending out a check to each employee. The result will be as many full-time employees as possible. The workers displaced by automation then move on to make other goods (perhaps napkins) or provide other services, with the same incentives to work full-time, and nobody has any more free time. The end result is just more goods to purchase, which the author seems to have disdain for.
The article starts by talking about pointless consumer spending (convincing people to buy things they don't need). This is a net loss to society.
However, the article doesn't make any kind of distinction between pointless consumer spending and wise consumer spending and instead runs off on a totally unrelated tangent about automation (which certainly helps but isn't related to the macroeconomic effects of consumption).
The article totally ignores the fact that "wise" consumer spending is a significant benefit to everyone – i.e. when consumers are buying things they need or where the benefit of the purchase exceeds the effort input to earning the money. It also helps progress the economy when consumers are buying products that are new and innovative and make technology or business model improvements.
I cannot see how increased automation without some pseudo-socialist redistribution of income is going to reduce working hours.
We had lots and lots of automation over the last generations - and all it led to is still the same long weeks, overnighters, checking in to the company via smartphone. The jobs made redundant have been replace by bullshit pseudo-jobs like commnity managers and social media experts.
It's a shame you think community manager is a bullshit job. Do you want to work the forums two hours a day rather than code? That's what the "community managers" at my workplace do, and I really appreciate it.
I do something like this in my spare time (not two hours a day of course) and would not ever consider it an occupation.
But it's not community manager per se - I could have chosen grocery packers at the checkout too. I was trying to pick on fluff jobs that are only marginally useful and can only exist because they cannot easily be automated and add just enough of marginal value that companies decide to pay for it. I doubt anyone would notice if they were gone and replaced by an inferior automaton longer than 2 weeks.
The point is: we are not reaping the fruits of 150 years of fierce rationalization, but fight for the 10% indispensable employees, keep the majority employed whether it makes sense or not - and pay the rest just enough that they don't starve. Seems dysfunctional to me.
>Fewer are willing to admit the culturally-exploratory, finding-yourself vacation experience we read about on a travel blog has pretty much the same level of benefit to society.
Totally lost me on this line. What's the point of being alive if you're not going to have experiences like travel. That pretty much only leaves work as an option to fill you're time.
While I'm mostly in agreement with the rest of the article, I think on this point that cultural exploration does actually benefit society to a degree, because it results in people who are better educated about the world and less xenephobic/racist. If you spent a gap year in a particular country and have friends there, you're much less likely to support a war against that country.
I'd agree that cultural exploration can benefit society by making people more accepting of each other. But I'd like to distinguish it as still being a form of consumption/production since no production is permanently improved. For example, if the person who did the exploration dies, unless they've done something clearly permanent to teach it to their kids or enshrine that learning, the experience will die with them. I feel like many vacations end up in that category, though obviously it's not a universal situation.
I consider it a combination of consumption and education, rather than production per se.
The balance between these two factors depends a lot on the person; someone who goes abroad just to party will have a little bit of cultural immersion but mostly just consume. Someone who goes abroad to seriously learn about a country, learn the language, spend time living there and getting to know the locals, will have more of an education.
Article comes across to me as a very preachy, high falutin, very warped perception of what constitutes a modern economy.
If the end outcome of increasingly rapid automation means that a significant percentage of humanity ends up being unable to participate in economic activity due to an inability to acquire currency, then we are in big trouble.
Maybe, as some people suggest, we need to redefine the nature of currency using social and environmental welfare as factors? The problem is, SWIFT, SIX Interbank Clearing and the ISO don't support this, banks don't support this, and national governments don't support this. Instead, IMHO, they pay it just enough lip service (eg. carbon credits) to keep it from having a truly fair go. With the technology we have available today, alternate and more broadly informed currencies are entirely feasible as potential instruments of trade for large portions of the economy, at least in the developed world. The kicker is, it will detract from nationalism, and governments have a PR problem with taxing the facilitation of social or environmental good.
How would these social and environmental factors be featured in the new currency? How would they differ from the current situation where things like moral value of goods are reflected directly in the price (green energy costs more because it has more value)? I'm having difficulties seeing how this new currency would work.
I'm no expert, there is an entire field here. However, basically, anything people agree to value can function as an asset to be traded as nationally issued fiat-currency (debt) is today. There's essentially no difference, though the latter has the historical benefit of being demanded as tax and supporting by a large army, theoretically though the governments cannot wield these against the hippy next door for, you know, growing trees (environmental credits) or sharing spliffs (social credits).
People wanting the currency (debt) is based upon trust; ie. the trust that the debt society owes you, symbolized in the form of your possession of the asset in question, will be redeemed at some future point by someone else for something you want. (Note that due to inflation and the creation of money in current era systems this debt notion is flipped; typical money must be repaid - with interest, at speed - or forfeited. But that's a tangent.)
A path forward will probably include convincing one or more governments to adopt some alternate assets and begin to effectively provide rates of exchange through government tax incentives or similar. This could kickstart a modern renaissance in multi-asset accounting and localized economies. Not holding my breath on speed, but anything's possible. Part of the challenge here is that social and environmental concerns typically cross borders and election terms, and developed countries' political decisionmaking is heavily blinkered against these two classes of issue.
I would suggest that to "improve ... humanity in general" you actually need to redefine the production process, the consumption process and what gets consumed.
If you keep the keep the same assumptions and automate more, all you wind-up with is people lose their jobs and become homeless because there's no new activity for them to do. And his example of increase production shows how that doesn't necessarily improve things. Of course, any increase in production does redefine all this stuff, it has to. The question is whether it redefines them enough.
first than nothing, discussion about the topic is great as most of the times is @hn, but I have this felling about this post:
why this kind of post keep appearing in HN? is this also going to go the same way of decadence as slashdot to end up being another Yahoo answers?
Let start to dissect the post:
The tenet is:
"Consumption doesn't improve economy or humanity in general. Neither does production. If you want to help, start automating things."
first thing first, where is the cold, hard data supporting this, or is this another "I would write some fancy stuff on my blog and get it re-blogged, I'm so tweet-in"? this is starting to be a trend, in which people throw a lot of poorly supported stuff to their blogs so they look "in".
Poor argument, emotion driven conclusion, at the beginning of the second paragraph is stated:
"Imagine"
but he later concludes:
"At this point, both of them are getting fat from their excessive consumption and working harder pay for it all."
what the heck does being fat has to do with the idea behind it all? is this a slimfast supporting post? what does the fat analogy means? was an analogy?
"Both are now working harder for things they don't need"
why they both should work harder? if they did not want ice cream or cookies the example is flawed in first place, economic should start with things that are required and go up to things we want a la Maslov.
"Of course, if they were intelligent people they'd try to improve the production of cookies and ice cream" it's called "competition" and it does already exist, it force you to create new technology to make the process cheaper and have better income from the same products allowing you to get your prices low (because you have better earning marging) and still be profitable, it's what prevents you from start making average tennis shoes, or cookies or ice cream because someone else is already way better at doing that; PLEASE do not come to the argument of "if they were intelligent" explain why is better.
"Is it true that we will only automate the processes we're working on once we're <<working long hours for things we don't need?>>" at this point I'm starting to think this is about a existential problem/phase of the author.
and I'm pretty sure you can start dissecting any part of the post with arguments pro and against it, as with anything else, it's the lack of any new light that bothers me, please don't tell me this will start to be the "throw some random stuff so I can show I'm cool" place.
1. As technology advances, machines will do more and more things that what human originally do.
2. As a result, less people will have jobs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment
3. At the same time, people (organization) who owns (not develops) machines will take this income.
4. People (organization) who owns more machines can more easily to buy another one.
5. Richer people will get richer. Poor people will get poorer.
-. Capitalism has bugs.
In the future (my crazy thoughts):
(If machines keep getting smarter)
> More and more jobs are handled by humans, thus things like labor strike will have less and less impact on machine owners - since machines can still work for them.
(If machines are smarter than human)
> People who cannot develop machines will have no competition with machine owners, since they have machines which are smarter
(If machines can developer machines)
> Even people who can develop machines (maybe the last group of people) will be unemployed. People who own machines will have endless expansion. And people's life will be depending on how many machines they have and how advanced the machines are.
About new jobs the machine enables:
Other than machine generator/operators, most of them are entertainment which are generated needs. This portion of job looks unlikely will be replaced by machines. But who knows.
I know my logic may be flawed and all objections with reasons are extremely welcome.
I only proposed a problem with no solution, as I cannot imagine one (and definitely not pure centralized socialism), and I like machines.