The brave new world of robots and lost jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#121

Post by yummyfajitas » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #113

yummyfajitas wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but at the moment there are many such jobs. Maid, cook, child care, a significant amount of construction labor, etc. I blogged about this a while back. Until robots do all the jobs that are actually done in India (e.g. robot cooks, robot maids, robot cigarette walas), there still exist jobs people can do. Americans just refuse to do them, since it's easier to not work. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robo…

>That may happen one day, but at the moment we have a scarcity of labor rather than a surplus. Then why have real wages dropped for much of the population, and why is the labor share of GDP at an all-time low?

First of all, this is a non-sequitur. Market prices can go up or down while scarcity still exists. Scarcity is simply a situation where a lot of people want a good or service, but not all of them can have it.

Secondly, your claims about market prices are not even directionally correct. Real wages have dropped because compensation has shifted from wages to benefits. (This effect is larger at the bottom, since non-wage benefits are a fixed cost while wages are variable.) Real compensation per hour has only gone up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

The labor share of GDP is down mainly because investment income (primarily from housing) has increased faster than labor income.

https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

Also, significant chunks of the economy have moved into non-labor personal income as the government has shifted from infrastructure/public goods to wealth redistribution.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#122

Post by leereeves » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #116

leereeves wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans expect and demand a lifestyle most Indians only dream of. For example, electric power consumption per capita is 765 kWh in India, 12,988 kWh in the USA. [1] 1: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

Admittedly, the vast majority of India is nowhere near as cold as the vast majority of America. Americans have to spend energy avoiding death by frost much of the year.

If we were willing to accept India-like population density and energy use, we could all live in the parts of the US where that's not the case.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#123

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #93

d4nt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the worker now gets to stay at home and pursue a hobby they enjoy, while the economy is still producing the same amount of goods, isn't that a net win? The problem is (a) people feel bad about being on welfare, and (b) we stop paying welfare again the moment that worker makes any money, creating a disincentive to engage in any form of small scale productive activity.

People feel bad about being on welfare because they want to work. They want to be productive. They want to have a purpose.

beep beep

I. am. a. person. I want... proooductive. I want... puurpose. I will. Take the orders. From a capital-supplier. To proooduce economic vallll-ue.

I. am. Totally. Not. a robot.

beep beep

/s

Seriously, though? People want to be exploited because they need a wage-paying employer to give them purpose? Then where are all the people who don't work for someone else getting this much-vaunted "purpose", eh? Whatever happened to all that individualism stuff, about people being ends rather than means?

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#124

Post by unprepare » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #119

unprepare wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That, and also resources are here to be burned for our comfort. what an incredible argument to make.

Why exactly? It's what we do, since we first tamed fire.

you are suggesting the purpose for resources existing at all are purely for human consumption.

essentially you're peddling the argument of "god put oil on earth for us to burn, if we dont burn it, its a waste!"

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#125

Post by randallsquared » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:25 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #100

cousin_it wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the existence of jobs you could quickly retrain to is an eternal law of nature :-(

No, but at the moment there are many such jobs. Maid, cook, child care, a significant amount of construction labor, etc. I blogged about this a while back. Until robots do all the jobs that are actually done in India (e.g. robot cooks, robot maids, robot cigarette walas), there still exist jobs people can do. Americans just refuse to do them, since it's easier to not work. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robo…

> there still exist jobs [like maid, cook, child care] people can do. Americans just refuse to do them

In many cases Americans refuse to hire them, for cultural reasons that may be the flip side of Americans refusing to do them. Child care is one that there seems to be a lot of (at least, one hears about it a lot), but maid, cook, butler, and even general handyman are positions that many Americans won't consider hiring someone for, in any stable, ongoing way.

I have no problem hiring an electrician to come in and rewire parts of my (1950s era) house, because the maximum I'm willing to pay is above the minimum I would need to pay to avoid feeling like I was cheating them. For full-time cook or maid or general laborer, the willing-max is below the fair-min.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#126

Post by dominotw » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:25 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #6

Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…

> he goes on welfare instead

he goes on to do something higher level, something more human.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#127

Post by leereeves » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:26 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #56

cousin_it wrote: post #6

Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…

I think the counterargument here is that if you don't need to move humans to work and back home again every day, and if you don't need to optimize workplace conditions for humans - by providing creature comforts and safety equipment - your unemployed human is using much less resources than a working human, and the robot is also using much less resources than a working human, so the sum of unemployed human + working r…

> resources are here to be burned for our comfort.

Shouldn't we also consider comfort in the future?

For that, we must manage resources to avoid exhausting them or destroying ecosystems, because that would create a very uncomfortable future.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#128

Post by CodeCube » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:29 PM UTC

klenwell wrote: post #106

simonh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see how it's the employer screwing anyone over. Should automation be outlawed? What kinds of automation? It's a problem that society needs to deal with, sure, and some of that might involve some regulation of automation, or some social support for manual jobs, but there's nothing inherently immoral about automation. If a company reduces it's work force through automation there's nothing immoral about that.…

> I fail to see how it's the employer screwing anyone over. Should automation be outlawed? I would look to the automation in scheduling in the service sector over the last couple decades for a pretty clear example of employers screwing over labor. Sure, you can make a good argument, as you do, that it's probably more amoral than immoral and the inevitable result of a race condition among the competition. But it's har…

These stories are heartbreaking to hear ... I sometimes wonder what the answer might be. Perhaps regulation that puts limits on a) the lead time employees must be given for a schedule, or b) limits on how chaotic a schedule can be (ie. generally mornings, or generally evenings), or c) a max # of hours between shifts to allow employees proper rest ??

You're right, this does feel like the employees are getting screwed ... especially when they can't even commit to anything else like school because of the chaotic nature of their schedule.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#129

Post by alanwatts » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:34 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #6

Simon Funk [1] makes a great point that in a mixed capitalist/welfare state, automation decreases efficiency. Imagine a worker, earning the bare minimum to survive, who gets replaced by a robot with slightly lower operating cost. Now the robot is consuming slightly fewer resources that the worker would have, but the worker doesn't stop consuming resources in turn! Unless you're willing to kill the worker, he goes on…

When workers' wages are lowered/replaced by a typical welfare program as a result of automation, the workers no longer have the purchasing power to purchase the goods produced by the automation, thus rendering such automation useless.

If prices for the end user do not decrease proportionately with the savings created by automation, the whole point of automation is nullified.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#130

Post by akerro » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:35 PM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #97

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True in theory, but Spain has been in a state of mass unemployment (>20% unemployment rate, >40% youth unemployment rate) since 2010, and it still is among the top 25 safest countries in the world ( http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/safest-countries-in-the-w... ). Portugal has been over 13% unemployment rate since 2011, and it's the 5th country in the world by that same index.

I would imagine they have much better social safety nets than in the US. In the US, if you are unable to work, for whatever reason, you are pretty much on your own.

Watch a movie "Where to invade next". EU countries where designed completely differently, in some countries welfare takes more than 60% of taxes.