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

Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

slatestarcodex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 233 posts

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#81

Post by Fricken »

paulpauper wrote: post #66
djrobstep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we are moving from jobs that are actually productive, to bullshit jobs. Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads. Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing. Then there's t…

This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs…

The parent argues that it's "a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder"

And you argue "If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs that are bullshit"

This is the same argument, just with a different spin. In the instance of Facebook, it was able to provide it's core utility with some software cobbled together by one guy in his dorm room over a couple weeks. So what are the other 25,000 employees for? It's not to make Facebook more useful, it's to prevent some other college kid from building a social media network that displaces it. It's all just a silly game that isn't very fun to play. One could argue that Facebook's core utility is now in delivering ads, but nobody likes looking at ads, and companies would rather not spend on ads if they didn't need to to compete, so again, it's all just a silly game. Very little of it is doing anything that is either useful or wanted.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#82

Post by pbhjpbhj »

paulpauper wrote: post #66
djrobstep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we are moving from jobs that are actually productive, to bullshit jobs. Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads. Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing. Then there's t…

This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs…

The jobs are useful to the company, they're not useful to society.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#83

Post by chopin »

adynatos wrote: post #31
crc32 wrote: post #20

Great article that seems to leave the question unresolved. If technological unemployment is not a large factor; but inequality within advanced economies is rising, then what other factors are at play? Are the changes necessary to deal with those causes the same changes that would be needed to deal with an all-knowing AI in 2150?

inequality is rising because some people are simply more skilled than others.

That could only be said with some certainty if we had equal opportunity. Most western societies are far off the mark in that regard.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#84

Post by lotsofpulp »

barry-cotter wrote: post #70
mistermann wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or worse. At least those dull and exhausting jobs could formerly afford you a reasonably content middle class lifestyle with a modest home, but that is increasingly out of reach of even some of the most successful in society at least in some countries, if you'd like to live where there are actually jobs. As we continue down this road to a winner takes all society, I'm not so sure this is what I'd call progress, and I…

Both a middle class lifestyle and a modest home are moving targets. People eat out a lot more than in the 70’s, they have larger homes and smaller families, they have safer and more reliable cars, they live longer. As far as being able to live where the jobs are this is a problem caused by NIMBYs. This is not a problem they have in Japan.

The root cause is fewer desirable jobs. Fewer businesses with a larger share of the market, in fewer and fewer places.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#85

Post by mdemare »

adynatos wrote: post #31
crc32 wrote: post #20

Great article that seems to leave the question unresolved. If technological unemployment is not a large factor; but inequality within advanced economies is rising, then what other factors are at play? Are the changes necessary to deal with those causes the same changes that would be needed to deal with an all-knowing AI in 2150?

inequality is rising because some people are simply more skilled than others.

"Some people are more skilled than others, therefore inequality exists" - sure. But why would that predict _rising_ inequality?

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#86

Post by ThomPete »

One of the problems is that most jobs (95%) created from 2005 up until now are temporary jobs[1]. That is in itself not necessarily a problem as it could mean that people just become freelancers. But for the US it opens up for two major issues.

1) Freelancers have to pay their healthcare themselves. 2) Most jobs created are forced freelance contracts i.e. even if you work at an accounting company they will try and put you on a freelance contract.

My personal belief is that while globalization is still growing we will not see the underlying changes until it' too late. That's why I think all governments should assume that most of their population will be without a job sooner or later and plan accordingly.

[1] https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created...

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#87

Post by nabla9 »

bsbechtel wrote: post #56

Employment is only a result of an individual wanting someone else to do something for them, because they don't have the time or skill to do it themselves. In exchange for someone doing this thing for them, they compensate them with something of value, normally payment in the form of currency. When you consider employment from this angle, I find it extremely hard to believe that a day will come where the majority of h…

Individuals are not just exchanging labor. What we want is result of combining factors of production together (capital, labor, land or natural resources).

What happens if the things people want today are 70 percent labor and 20 years from now just 40 percent labor (this is called capital deepening). Will the return of capital decrease and how much wage share decreases? Is government spending or wealth transfer increasing in the economy?

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#88

Post by tjoff »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #55

Warning: the following is conjecture which I have not researched. Because who has the time? My main question while reading this article was why is the author so stuck on "manufacturing" jobs being automated away? He does address this very briefly in section III but I cannot help but feel his foundational research is highly skewed. Sure, robotics are growing in popularity and that technology, specifically, will likely…

> Only the larger manufacturers are going to be upgrading plants [...]

Well, one consequence of this might be that only larger manufacturers survive. The new robots are increasingly general purpose and an army of those could quickly switch tasks based on current needs.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#89

Post by tonyedgecombe »

paulpauper wrote: post #66
djrobstep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we are moving from jobs that are actually productive, to bullshit jobs. Advertising doesn't produce anything useful in itself, it simply shifts and amplifies demand, and yet, Google, Facebook, and a vast slice of the rest of the economy is dedicated to producing ads. Even companies which are nominally dedicated to producing things of importance (eg pharmaceuticals) are mostly focussed on marketing. Then there's t…

This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs…

Yet large companies often have hugely bureaucratic and wasteful practices. When I was contracting I would go from one business with an IT department of 100 to another employing 1,000. They were broadly similar organisations, yet there was plenty of variance in their efficiency.

Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#90

Post by mrob »

builditand wrote: post #51
elgenie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook/Snap/Gaming/Digital-Entertainment don't employ all that many people. I'd be surprised if the ratio of entertainers / audience is much different than it was for, say, stars of silent movies 100 years ago, even though Charlie Chaplin wasn't doing something that could be termed "needed for society to function".

Ah, but he did. See [The Great Dictator]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator ) for example. For us to function we need people like Chaplin to show us (in a way or another) what's going on in the world.

The Great Dictator is one of the few films with obvious value beyond entertainment, because it's a vaccine against Triumph of the Will. Triumph of the Will is a skillfully made propaganda film, and if you have no awareness of how it works then it would be easy to leave with positive feelings about the Nazis, even if only subconsciously. But once you've seen The Great Dictator it becomes a joke. E.g. the low camera angles don't make Hitler look powerful, they just remind you of the extending chair scene. His exaggerated gestures no longer project confidence, and instead make you think of slapstick routines.

John Cleese's silly walk had the same effect on the goose-stepping scenes. It's art that makes people more rational, by transforming emotional manipulation tricks into comedy. It's beneficial even if you don't agree with all of the politics of it (e.g. Chaplin's call for open borders).

Post reply on HN