Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 245 posts

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#181

Post by yummyfajitas »

auggierose wrote: post #177
yummyfajitas wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said repeatedly above, the basic job guarantee is just another job. It pays primarily in-kind benefits (i.e. rooms in govt dorms, govt cafeteria food, etc) and little money, and it's available to anyone who wants it. Also welfare is eliminated the day we create the basic job (or after some phase-in period, more realistically). So basically yes, the government will pay for an army of child carers, an army of infr…

Please don't put words in my mouth I didn't say. It is a matter of motivation, you need people who are motivated to do a job and skilled enough to do it. YOU brought up the public school teacher as an example, and I like it. A child carer needs to be compensated with money, just as any other professional or teacher, because money means choice and power. A child carer should not be forced into a salary race to the bot…

I didn't put words in your mouth. I explicitly said that was just the only thing I could come up with to fill in the blanks, and I explicitly asked for you to clarify. So again, here's the concrete question. It's a positive question about the world, not a normative question about what you think should happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_statement#Positive_st...

Suppose we implement my scheme and people who can't find a job wind up caring for children in return for in-kind benefits. What objectively bad things will happen to the children as a result and why will those things happen?

What I'm trying to disambiguate here is moral/aesthetic preferences ("should not be forced into a salary race to the bottom" because I don't like it) and positive claims about the world ("a basic job will cause children to die of aids after former welfare recipients stab them with dirty needles").

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#182

Post by digitalarborist »

imgabe wrote: post #178
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…

This only makes sense if the robot consumes as much resources as the human. I think a robot would consume far far less. Maybe 1% of what a human uses at most. 1. To build a robot you have to mine raw materials and refine them and assemble them and program them. This takes a while, but to build a human worker you need to feed, house, clothe and educate them for 18+ years. 2. The human can only reliably work 8 hours a…

I think you're likely underestimating the resources it takes to make robotics work. They get better all the time, but they do so by a lot of blood sweat and tears. We haven't even managed to make them walk at all convincingly yet, it's a really tough problem. As messy as the virtual world can be, the real world is a lot messier. In the long run robots are almost certainly cheaper, in the short term though they are usually very expensive resource wise.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#183

Post by oli5679 »

danielbln wrote: post #104
oli5679 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got the 1st order effects completely right, but there would be several second-order effects that would undermine this result. (1) There would be a fall in non-skilled wages, increasing demand for non-skilled labour output. (2) The reduction in marginal costs would increase supply of the good and reduce its price. (3) The increased profits earned by the firm/robot inventor would increase demand or saving/consum…

In 1850, 60%+ of the American labour force were farmers and over the next 100 years their jobs were automated out of existence by range of more efficient 'robots'. This was no-doubt harmful for many specific farm labourers, but didn't 'screw over the economy'. I hear that argument all the time, but I wonder if it takes into account the ever increasing pace of technological advancement.

I think the labour-market effects of technological advancement are slower now than they have been at any time in the last 100 years. The internet and mobile phones have large impacts on media-consumption and social dynamics but they aren't dramatically reshuffling the labour force in the same way innovations like the combine-harvester, container-ship, car and washing-machine did every decade between 1900 and 1970.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#184

Post by TimJRobinson »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #145
ohnomrbill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can cook. Will people pay me a living wage to cook? Will that wage cover lost income from being on government programs? Does cooking (given the relative difficulty of becoming wealthy doing so) provide an income ceiling higher than getting paid via welfare/Social Security? There is plenty of work to be done. It's just not paid work. How do you propose to coerce people to pay for this work?

I propose to replace welfare/disability fraud/etc with a guarantee job (FDR style) that pays in-kind benefits. I.e., if you claim you can't find a job, the government will give you a job fixing our crumbling infrastructure, providing child care for working women, or similar things. In return you get a room in a government dormitory, a healthy meal from the government cafeteria, a government track suit, etc. Now the "…

The main reason most countries don't force those on welfare to work is that some of the current recipients will say "screw this I'm not working for peanuts" and turn to theft, selling drugs or prostitution. If they were allowed to just be they would entertain themselves at home. So you have to be willing to accept this increased crime tradeoff for this to work.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#185

Post by burkaman »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #179
PeterisP wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This measure of inequality is mostly influenced by the distance between the mean income and the largest earners (who constitute a huge portion of the total GDP), however, I still maintain that in India there is a much larger distance between the mean income and the lowest wages of simple laborers/maids/walas/etc than the first world. It seems that you are from India, can you give an anecdotal example of how large is…

I'm not from India but I spend a lot of time there. Most people don't have a full time maid. They have a maid who comes daily (or maybe 3x/week) and also works for others. This is quite feasible economically in the US - suppose cleaning a home takes 2 hours and a maid accepts $10/hour. That's $20/day or $430/month (assuming 5x/week). So in the US you could get comparable levels of service for maybe $1000/month. It's…

You can't just look at the supply side. It's hard to imagine there's very much demand for $500-$1000/month maid services, especially in areas where all these people on welfare live.

Also, do you know anyone on welfare in the US? Do they really seem like they're "sitting around" to you?

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#186

Post by notahacker »

Noseshine wrote: post #51
notahacker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proportion of people in full time work is much higher than it was when people worried about mechanization eliminating all those not-very-prestigious jobs in the post-WWII period...

My comment was pretty short - yet you managed to ignore a major part? Looking at statistics telling you that now both adults in the family have to work to home ownership to private debt levels doesn't support your story. Look at the number of dual-income families, for example.

Is there any income quartile in any developed country that has less prestigious or lower real incomes per full-time worker than the equivalent in the immediate post war period? Disproportionate rises in house prices and growth in consumer credit and student debt are consequences of a region having access to better employment opportunities, not worse ones.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#187

Post by yummyfajitas »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #184
yummyfajitas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose to replace welfare/disability fraud/etc with a guarantee job (FDR style) that pays in-kind benefits. I.e., if you claim you can't find a job, the government will give you a job fixing our crumbling infrastructure, providing child care for working women, or similar things. In return you get a room in a government dormitory, a healthy meal from the government cafeteria, a government track suit, etc. Now the "…

The main reason most countries don't force those on welfare to work is that some of the current recipients will say "screw this I'm not working for peanuts" and turn to theft, selling drugs or prostitution. If they were allowed to just be they would entertain themselves at home. So you have to be willing to accept this increased crime tradeoff for this to work.

So poor people are a bunch of stationary bandits and we pay them money in tribute to prevent them from harming us? What horrible people you make them out to be.

(Note: I have no problem with people who sell drugs or sex and think both should be legal. I'm referring specifically to theft here.)

I'm not sure why we need to accept this increased crime tradeoff. Why can't we (here "we" refers to folks who are willing to work for money rather than steal) just wall ourselves off from them?

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#188

Post by beat »

system16 wrote: post #165
beat wrote: post #161

I'm prone to saying my job is to build robots to do my job for me. Any time I can replace my own labor with a robot (script/program), I do so. I won't ever run out of work, because software is inherently creative. It's the uncreative jobs that rely on humans as muscle or control mechanisms that are in danger. It's not like humanity has never gone through this before, either. Two centuries ago, 98% of people were empl…

A lot of software development is far from creative. Many company projects involve making versions of X that do Y (Facebook for the enterprise!), or modifying an existing tool to fit a new requirement. A lot of it comes down to putting together existing pieces, and while there aren't a lot of solutions today that can accomplish this effectively without humans, I think it's a bit short-sighted to think there won't be i…

I've been creating software professionally for over 20 years. The only tools from the start that are still in my toolbox are Unix (now Linux) and SQL. Java didn't even exist when I started, nor did Python or Ruby or JavaScript or even Apache. But my job feels basically the same. It always will, because the problems are always out there at the edge. They're incredibly specific, and often at the bleeding edge of what software can do.

Basically, software meets human needs. You need humans to come up with problems to solve, and describe them specifically enough that a computer can be programmed to repeat the solution. So those creative tasks, and the discipline of turning vague human ideas into strict logic, those aren't going anywhere, at least not with the tools we have today, or a reasonable extrapolation of those tools into the future. Programming languages may change, but the existence of programming languages does not. You still need humans to figure out how to say what they really mean.

On the other hand, I could spend days or weeks configuring a development server old-school, or I can run 'vagrant up' and have a perfect, repeatable development environment that works on any server. That's the robots. I love the robots.

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#189

Post by [deleted] »

imgabe wrote: post #178
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…

This only makes sense if the robot consumes as much resources as the human. I think a robot would consume far far less. Maybe 1% of what a human uses at most. 1. To build a robot you have to mine raw materials and refine them and assemble them and program them. This takes a while, but to build a human worker you need to feed, house, clothe and educate them for 18+ years. 2. The human can only reliably work 8 hours a…

[deleted]

Re: The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

#190

Post by kamaal »

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…

For any mass replacement of humans with robots, you will need AGI and with that will come ethical issues of treating robots as humans themselves.

By having robots you are only replacing humans with a biological body with humans with a robot body.

Post reply on HN