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

What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 576 posts

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#311

Post by arrosenberg »

JamesBarney wrote: post #253
pdonis wrote: post #242

The article lost me in the second paragraph, with "there is not enough work to go around". Seriously? There are so many things that need to be done. We need better energy sources. We need better health care. We need better infrastructure. I could go on and on. There is a huge amount of work to be done. More than enough for everybody.

Then the big question is if work is a aplenty, and workers scarce. Why is it so hard for such a large portion of the population to find good work? Why doesn't all of that work turn into jobs?

That work requires government initiative and investment. Many of the depressed areas keep voting for politicians who are convinced government doesn't work and they are determined to prove it. Thus, the labor force remains depressed instead of fixing the obscene number of infrastructure issues in the rust belt.

Can you imagine if they spent the next 4 years spending some money to fix up the cities to make them attractive to young people? It might bring new investment, jobs and life to the area.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#312

Post by PrimalDual »

mixedCase wrote: post #124
PrimalDual wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So right now it comes from other people's paycheck but does it have to? Why don't rich countries like the US, Switzerland or Japan not print money to cover their spending? Inflation is not the problem it used to be and I actually think it's a much better measure of the economy's capacity than unemployment. Would inflation of 4% be that bad for the public and financial system anyways? In the US at least I strongly opp…

Because if you continue printing money the inflation doesn't stop growing at some point. This is Econ 101.

I don't understand you try to characterize money printing with runsway inflation. For one I am Not arguing for unlimited money printing I am talking more about QE style money printing. You don't continue pumping money into the economy if it's already at full capacity and you have reached your inflation target. In fact the United States has printed trillions of dollars through QE but what we experience right now is a very far from runaway inflation. What I am saying is perhaps we need higher inflation to get full employment. I also don't think a 4% target is exactly Venezuela levels of inflation.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#313

Post by drubenstein »

reflexive wrote: post #303

Article has many holes in reasoning. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum As NN Taleb points out exhaustively: social science puts too much faith in their models. "Measurable" trends? How do we even know what to measure, or that it's a trend? "Plausible" projections?…

Agreed about the "many holes". Furthermore on the models

But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment.

This seems to be conjuring a whole new economic model out of thin air. How can it be the case that all of the models are wrong and that this model is right? I'm not saying it's wrong or right, but the preceding argumentation is not enough to support this line of thought.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#314

Post by freehunter »

Cybiote wrote: post #297
freehunter wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. The problem is, you wouldn't want to pay thousands of dollars for a robot to make you a sandwich or clean your toilet because those are things you can easily do yourself for free. And there's no economy of scale to offset the cost, because it's just doing it for only you . How about "get your bot to build my microprocessors" or "get your bot t…

Making a sandwich or cleaning a toilet is certainly not an easy thing to do. Getting a robot that can understand a scene, any scene and plan motions within it has been very difficult to do. Far more difficult than playing Go at a superhuman level for example. This is known by various names, with one common being the Moravec Paradox . The problem of energy storage further multiplies this difficulty.

I think we're getting confused on the definition of how the robot accomplishes its task. To clean a toilet like a human would, yeah that's difficult. To clean a toilet like a robot would, it's not. A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. Really, really easy thing to do. If a Roomba can clean my entire house, not fall down the stairs, and find its way back to its dock by itself, you can put it on stilts and attach a spinning brush to the bottom and let it find the toilet.

Likewise for a sandwich, if the meat and cheese and bread are all in robot-compatible forms, it's just layering them together. Not much more complicated than a printer that can pull from multiple paper trays. You can even combine the two for maximum efficiency.

What's hard is making a robot behave like a human, because even humans struggle at behaving like a human. IMO there's no purpose to making a robot have the same physical constraints as a human. Our bodies are pretty shitty when you think about it. Robots can be much more elegant.

If you don't think there are sandwich-making robots that actually exist, I'd wonder how you think gas station ham sandwiches are made. Hint: it's a conveyor belt that drops bread, then cheese, then ham, then more bread. That's a robot that makes sandwiches. I'd sell you one for $1m, but you'd probably say "I can make my own for free, thank you!"

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#315

Post by cmurf »

sqldba wrote: post #227
cmurf wrote: post #226

Well, if we're going to simplistically blame just one thing and blame the premise of jobs, why not blame the premise that everyone has a right to propagate, or do so as many times as they want? Obviously it's less provocative to say fuck work than fuck children; or jobs are the problem than too many humans are the problem. But if there aren't enough jobs to go around, part of that is because there are so many people.

Agreed. Why stop there though? How come some people hoard and/or inherit millions or billions? Has one Bill Gates really done the work of 40,000 people worth a million each?

Certainly. That kind of disproportionate wealth comes via exploitation though, not only hoarding and inheritance.

Is there even enough wealth to go around? If the total wealth is $233 trillion, and there are 7 billion people, each person gets $33286. If we were to just wealth redistribute, does that actually solve the problem under discussion? I don't know whether it does. For a huge amount of earth's population it's the value of more than a lifetime of work.

And could it be true that there's a big fat bubble everywhere else where that same amount of money doesn't even get you by for a year, or in the richest cities in the U.S. not even 6 months? What happens if the veil of ignorance applied to resource allocation were simply reset, globally?

Probably a lot of fraud, exploitation, and murder, to take that share from others to enrich a few. I think we like to pretend we're civilized. The language we use now isn't even describing the problem fairly or accurately.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#316

Post by JustSomeNobody »

goatherders wrote: post #290
cesarbs wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the bit that hits close to home to me: > they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work My wife and I are both software engineers and that is a nearly constant source of stress for us. In our experience, people in our field frown upon people who treat software engineering as just their job. Two things I recall fro…

My biggest frustration at work is the colleagues - most of whom are software engineers - that are inconvenienced when being asked to consider work outside of normal business hours. I don't really care if they are happy; that's what overpaying them is for. What I care about is getting one of them to answer the phone at 5:05pm on a tuesday and not getting a return call until 9:03 on a Wednesday.

Yeah, there's something wrong with you. Not trying to be mean, but what you wrote, that's not normal.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#317

Post by stale2002 »

knieveltech wrote: post #300
stale2002 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are empty houses, but not in places where people want to live. There is absolutely a housing shortage in popular metropolitan areas (take your pick) . If there wasn't, then prices wouldn't be so high.

Popular because people are clumping in areas that have jobs...

Also because they like those areas? Many people dream of moving to New York. And they would dream that with out without the jobs.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#318

Post by edblarney »

freehunter wrote: post #286
edblarney wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya. Whenever anyone talks about 'the singularity' (i.e. computer consciousness) I usually respond with "get your bot to make me a goddam ham sandwich and clean my toilet!" - then we can talk! But let's avoid calling people 'retarded', eh :)

Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. The problem is, you wouldn't want to pay thousands of dollars for a robot to make you a sandwich or clean your toilet because those are things you can easily do yourself for free. And there's no economy of scale to offset the cost, because it's just doing it for only you . How about "get your bot to build my microprocessors" or "get your bot t…

"Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. "

Sorry, but no. Very, very hard.

+ Find my fridge + Open it + Find the meat + Find the bread + Open the mayo + Get a knife + Spread it

etc. etc. etc.

Even if you do it 'the machines way' it's extremely difficult.

No way. Not for quite a while.

Much harder than 'driving a car'.

Without proving it directly - let me do it indirectly:

Factories would love to have robots with such intelligence and dexterity. It's definitely worth '10's of thousands of dollars' per machine to do that.

If machines could do that ... even Chinese labourers would be out of a job.

We can barely make robotic arms that 'hold stuff' of any weight reasonably without getting out of balance.

Go ahead and look at industrial grade robot-arms - you'll see these powerful steel machines - max load: 5 lbs (!).

McDonald's would be having robots prep your burgers - even ina a controlled/machine setting - and they don't do it - because it's a ways off.

There are so many issues with that one, it's a long way off.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#319

Post by drvdevd »

goatherders wrote: post #290
cesarbs wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the bit that hits close to home to me: > they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work My wife and I are both software engineers and that is a nearly constant source of stress for us. In our experience, people in our field frown upon people who treat software engineering as just their job. Two things I recall fro…

My biggest frustration at work is the colleagues - most of whom are software engineers - that are inconvenienced when being asked to consider work outside of normal business hours. I don't really care if they are happy; that's what overpaying them is for. What I care about is getting one of them to answer the phone at 5:05pm on a tuesday and not getting a return call until 9:03 on a Wednesday.

I've been on both sides of this equation: not wanting to be availble outside of "business hours" and also feeling frustrated when colleagues aren't available when I need them.

I view this as an engineering and social process problem: your systems should be reliably engineered such that off hours maintenance or other technical issues are minimized. This gets to the social part: people will be more receptive to off hours work if its a rare occurance.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#320

Post by tmptmp »

vacri wrote: post #230
cesarbs wrote: post #212

Another good read on the topic: http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/political-science/t... I like this bit: "the knowledge worker is under severe external constraints. Much of their work is assisted or mediated through information technology, which contributes to a de-skilling of their cognitive labor. And on top of this they are expected to fully invest themselves in their jobs in a way that manufacturing labor…

Are you serious? Knowledge workers have it easy . It's hard to get here, but once we're here it's a great gig. We're paid well, we're in demand, and there's a robust freelancing sector to our industries, be it software, legal, medical, engineering, or whatever. That link describes a call center worker as a knowledge worker. That's absolute nonsense. You could, in theory, argue that a call center worker is about manag…

>>call center drones

How about the Amazon drones, even the ones on the "Amazon software team"? Is working at Amazon much different than what your parent described? Odd working hours, working beyond your duty hours, constant stress and some more negatives. Amazon does get in bad light due to such practices. So.

Add to that the H1B visa drones.

Although I agree with your overall premise and argument about that article, I think many if not most workers in software world are not very far off.

edit: added H1B point

Post reply on HN