No Recent Automation Revolution • Hacker News Board

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#251

Post by ClumsyPilot » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

tharne wrote: post #229

omginternets wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the parent poster does not have Vietnam, nor North Korea, nor even communism in mind. You know this, and we know you know this.

Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end. The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation. It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when tal…

So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live? There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great? Maybe thats the key differentiator?

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#252

Post by new2628 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

lnsru wrote: post #124

I have very interesting process when taking vacation. Automation does not mean robots from movie “I Robot”, some software can do the job too. To take time off I must open shitty software, enter my vacation days, then print the sheet and sign it. My manager signs it too. Then I bring it to secretary, she signs too, confirms the date in shitty software. Secretary sends paper form to the HR lady, she checks, if it’s ok…

I fail to see the huge improvement once you automate all that. You'll have three fewer occasions per day to chat with real people.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#253

Post by andrepd » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

kaybe wrote: post #169

Zaskoda wrote: post #10

Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program. We did in months what we had originally planned to do in years. As we are able to open our operations center further, it's clear that we'll be providing fewer jobs than we did before. At least some part of that is the result of automation. I can't help but think this same pattern is playing out at other companies right now.

It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them. I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

>I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

Hm there was a certain German economist which had that sort of idea.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#254

Post by m12k » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

bamboozled wrote: post #236

kaybe wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them. I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

> It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed. If I had to guess, you have a job, so it's fun for you to sit here and make these comments from your high horse.

I don't see what high horse you are talking about. The point is that having to work in order to survive is not inherently a desirable situation for a human to be in. A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on. Historically such a life has been possible for a select few in the aristocracy, and they seem to have had a great time - usually at the expense of serfs, slaves or other less privileged classes. Hopefully, eventually we'll all be able to live a life like that, with robots or software instead of slaves. So when someone says that we shouldn't consider jobs to be inherently valuable, they are pointing out that what is valuable is not our labor, but the fruit of our labor. That we should seek to improve results rather than effort. 150 years ago, ~70% of the population in western countries needed to work in agriculture to ensure the food supply - today it's less than 5%, and that's great! So yes, currently human work is still needed to keep society running, and for that reason we have created social norms around it being ethical to work and unethical not to, in order to get everyone to pitch in. But the truth is that there is nothing inherently unethical about not working, as long is it's not at the expense of someone else having to work even harder. As such, if you want to put on the tin-foil-hat a bit, you might even consider that it could be that the class that already lives a life where they don't need to work - the upper class (who make their living by owning things) has over-sold this whole notion of 'work == good' to the middle class (who make their living by working) in order for them to feel better than the lower class (who are unemployed) and ensure any anger is directed downward and those two classes will fight it out instead of questioning the world order.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#255

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #247

lotsofpulp wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but in my understanding the opposition to UBI is not primarily about dignity, Opposition to UBI (as well as healthcare for all, proper schooling for all, nutritional food for all, etc) is about not wanting to pay higher taxes and maintaining a competitive edge in being able to obtain resources over others in society (or the world). Those with more wealth (or who think they are capable of gaining more wealth) want t…

There are lots of reasons for not supporting those things. Some in-line with what you said. Others not. The issues are more complicated than you're making them out to be.

I used to think that, but over the years, in my cohort, the same group of people oppose any measures at wealth redistribution or anything that helps people who sell their labor.

Removing tax advantages of healthcare from employers? Oppose.

Removing exempt status or even raising the minimum salary under which an employer has to pay overtime? Oppose.

Lowering the cost of education? Oppose.

Parental or sick leave? Oppose.

Outlawing non competes? Oppose.

There's always some reason, which I believe to be a façade. The consistency and fervor with which they do not want labor to gain negotiating power is revealing. And, of course, always in support of tax cuts.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#256

Post by tharne » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #249

tharne wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is the default system that evolves organically when free men and women create things of value and voluntarily exchange them with others. That's not to say it's perfect or 100% fair. That's why you always hear communists and socialists talk about the need for a "revolution". No one ever talks about a capitalist revolution because people don't need to be coerced into voluntarily exchanging goods and services…

Most countries run on fiat to exchange wealth. Fiat already takes a huge leap of faith in the state issuing it. To think that the current economy is anything like barter is bogus. There is too much blind trust that the current economy is more fair than not, which leads to "fiat wealth" = "human worth" thinking, while money leaks like a sieve to entrenched interests.

If you're saying that there isn't a "pure capitalist" system in existence today, that's true. I think we mostly agree in our points, even if we're coming at it a bit differently. Crony capitalism, as practiced in most developed countries today, shares a lot of the same bad outcomes seen in socialist systems. Namely, you have a large state with a monopoly on violence, using its considerable power to pick winners and losers, often in a way that is not based on the value created by groups or individuals, but rather the political power and influence of those groups or individuals.

The answer to this is not to double down and give the state even more power to pick winners and losers, thinking that "this time will be different" or "we just need to get the smartest most moral people into power".

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#257

Post by ameister14 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #207

taneq wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last several years, for instance. How many people worked on assembly lines in, say, 1910 vs. 2010? How about as a percentage of an average manufacturer's staff? How many people worked as social media managers in 2010? I'd bet that (adjusted for population growth) for every 100 assembly line workers in 1910 you now have 2-3 stressed out engineers plus a bunc…

Sure, but somehow the total number of jobs has still managed to increase from 1910 to 2010. Automation shifts the work humans do. So far, it hasn't replaced the need for humans to do work, or we'd have a shrinking job market, which we didn't have prior to Covid (a temporary situation).

If you track the rise of administrative staff from 1990 to 2020, you see a massive increase. For example, HBR posted that healthcare jobs grew by a total 75% from 1990-2012, and that 95% of that growth was non-medical staff.

This growth doesn't really have anything to do with necessary work. It has to do with how incentives function for management.

We do not and have never had an economy where everyone is needed for production. In economics, as the marginal increase in utility for a worker goes down you would think that there would be less workers hired, or at least they would be more evaluated prior to hiring. That doesn't take into account the competing incentives of middle and upper management who have no real incentive to increase production efficiency or where that incentive isn't properly balanced against the social and internal gain from having a larger budget and staff within an organization.

If you have the ability to hire and gain from hiring people more than you lose from their work being totally unnecessary, you hire. It's not your money you're wasting. Afterwards, you or your new hires will create systems of increasing complexity to justify the continued employment and hiring of new workers.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#258

Post by shuntress » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #224

wolfram74 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If unearned income is unfulfilling, we should raise the estate tax, why should the children of the poor be so blessed to need to work while the children of millionaires and billionaires be saddled with the curse of ennui?

You might think you're being facetious, but many wealthy people don't want their children's lives to be wasted on consumption, and so limit their inheritance: enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing. The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people - not necessarily for money, but for other people. I'd love if we could try and figure out a social, institutional, structural technology whic…

>The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people

Exactly. So we should set up a system that provides everyone with enough to meet their basic needs.

That way they can spend their time and effort to find the way they can most effectively do things for other people rather than finding the local maxima "job I can tolerate that keeps me alive"

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#259

Post by tharne » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #251

tharne wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end. The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation. It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when tal…

So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live? There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great? Maybe thats the key differentiator?

Capitalist countries can be free and open democracies or they can be brutal dictatorships, but they at least have a path to a free society if they so choose it.

A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#260

Post by carapace » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #226

EGreg wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things become more fulfilling when you see everyone else doing them, such as raising kids. There are so many things people could be doing which are not compensated by the market and corporations. “Leaning in and earning $1 instead of 70c” is a meme that corporations use to get more humans to trade quality time with parents and kids for them. [1] Why don’t we ask about “Leaning out and spending more time with our fami…

> You've been CONDITIONED I haven't been conditioned, thanks. Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. We can't live at our current standards with artisan search engines, hand-crafted phones and home-made cars. But the same scale which enables modern living alienates workers from their labour. In most companies, all but a select few at the top have very little agency. They…

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I'm struck that your objection to having been "conditioned" is immediately followed by a paragraph affirming the content of the supposed "conditioning".

> > You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all.

Emphasis added.

> Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. ...

I want to point out in this connection that advertising (commercial propaganda) is ubiquitous in most modern societies, and IMO counts as "conditioning".