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Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
161–170 of 233 posts
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...
> Given the possibility of remote work, [...] urban centers. Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on people's geographic distribution. Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking (researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive finger tracking (hopef…
I don't understand what problem VR/AR is solving in your hypothetical.
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#163The idea that rising disability is a cause of declining labor force participation is interesting, and fits in with anecdotal data from what family members in medicine have told me. They basically phrase it as: If you're uneducated and poor, why would you work a low paying job with little hope of advancement when you could go on disability and collect a similar amount of money without working?
To be fair, many of these people are actually disabled. It's just that previously they could work. Like the article says, their managers cared about them and and had the capacity to let them take lower-impact positions that they were capable of doing. We don't appreciate how difficult it can be to employ these marginally capable workers. Keeping these people on staff at a small company raises health and operational i…
I agree partly, but from what my family members have told me it seems that some people are gaming the system for their own benefit. They've also told me that people who truly would benefit from being on disability (like your father) often have a hard time getting on it.
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> OK - would you agree that this presents us with an ethical problem? My instinct is that inequality is not inherently unethical if it's a fair reflection of people's skills and/or efforts. If people are so poor that their needs are going unmet that's an ethical problem, but those people are not made any worse off by the existence of wealthy people. > How about a societal/practical problem? Is an unequal society sust…
>those people are not made any worse off by the existence of wealthy people. // How does that work? If there are wealthy people using more than their share of resources and energy, staying wealthy on the back of other's labour (rent-seeking, capitalism), then surely the presence of those wealthy people makes resources/energy more scarce and the need to pay the excess in order to maintain the wealthy means all goods/s…
Most of the cost of most things - especially most things consumed by wealthy people - rests much more in labour than in physical resources; poor people are net sellers of labour so wealthy people inflating the price of labour helps them more than it hurts them. Land is an exception (being in limited supply) and I do think a land value (Georgist) tax would be morally desirable, with the proceeds distributed equally to everyone.
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not necessarily. It might just mean that, on balance, people who were never going to employ a maid in the first place live in slightly less filthy houses. But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like anything else, with lots of people on the margin (and I'm pretty sure I was one of them), and the introductio…
>But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like anything else Even if it was a bell curve (and I see no reason why reality ought to be that neat), there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses rather than fewer maids. > You already mentioned Roombas, and I mentioned LaundryBot Room…
> there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses rather than fewer maids.
If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how dirty their house is (and how could it not be?) then the two are equivalent. The only way roombas could not be putting people out of work on the margin is if there's some sort of mysterious discontinuity, and why would we assume such a thing?
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#166I'm somewhat surprised by the article's conclusion, but will accept it, given that Scott is pretty thorough with his sourcing and analysis. Even though he says we're getting the worst outcome (something is happening, but it's not apocalyptic, so people won't notice in time to coordinate at scale), it shifted my internal doomsday countdown ~20 years to the future. One thing I wonder though, and it's a general concern…
If I may ask, what was your internal doomsday countdown before reading the article?
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Roughly none of that land is freely available. You'll have to qualify that statement a little. Here is 5 acres of land in Texas for $1500 [1], found it in about 60 seconds. [1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/209109538...
I actually said roughly, I didn't go back and edit that in or anything. If you want to do brass tacks or whatever, buy it and scrape out a living to prove that cheap scrub desert makes a point about land being available.
What if automation and robotics made homesteading much easier, and more likely to succeed on land that was previously considered useless?
Obviously water and other resources are going to be an issue, but as a labour multiplier, AI and robotics have huge potential.
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roughly none of that land is freely available. It's also pretty clear that some sort of resource footprint is more interesting than apparent living density. Just food requires more than a few hundred square feet per person and we consume a lot more than food.
> Roughly none of that land is freely available. You'll have to qualify that statement a little. Here is 5 acres of land in Texas for $1500 [1], found it in about 60 seconds. [1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/209109538...
And the cost of plumbing and electrifying that land would be astronomical. Public works have a network effect.
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#169Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly necessary for employment of labor. Labor can be applied whenever labor has access to land. So the question is why can't people just go to work? Grow their own food to feed themselves, if need be? The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming beca…
"The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal"
Not completely true, see the Inclosure Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
It's not unique to England either, it's just well documented there. Generally speaking the process of removing subsistence hunters, herders and farmers off of land they have historically lived off takes place with violence - not because they can't pay the rent anymore.
Additionally, the claim on the land of the people who are generally doing the displacing is usually questionable at best...
This isn't a matter of history either, taking land held in common by indigenous people with little if any recompense is a process that continues today in many parts of the world.
Re: Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
unequal society was sustainable exactly until now. there is no evidence whatsoever that it won't still be.
If you consider the unnecessary death and suffering of other people, and major environment impacts, to be "sustainable" then yes, unequal society has been entirely sustainable. In practice the inequality has lead to massive unrest (eg civil war), disease, and famine time and again. You can't honestly look back at history and consider that inequality has been anything other than a cause of immeasurable misery.
from my point of view all those deaths and massive unrests resulted from various groups trying to do away with inequality, usually by taking what's not theirs.