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

Are jobs obsolete?

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 331 posts

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#61

Post by Supermighty »

felipemnoa wrote: post #31
jswinghammer wrote: post #17

I'm not sure the Post Office's problems are related to technology. Their union negotiated a "no layoff" provision in their contract just this year. Why would you agree to that as an employer? Then there is the problem of defined benefit pensions where you end up keeping people basically on staff long after they stop working for you. The Post Office needs to go bankrupt and clear these contracts out and move forward w…

If getting a job at wages you are willing to pay means that the person will still not be able to meet any of its monetary obligations it pretty much means that the person is , for all practical purposes, still unemployed. Why work for slave wages if the outcome is the same. Better stay home and not be taken advantage off. How do this people live with no income? Most likely family or government assistance.

Chicken and egg. If the workers can't pay rent the market will correct rent down. It's that it takes too long to correct and someone's bound to be evicted before that happens.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#62

Post by dreamdu5t »

saraid216 wrote: post #47
dreamdu5t wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what Jello implies is wrong. People have the inherent ability to do bad things and treat eachother differently, regardless of whatever property system you have in place. Unemployment and undereducation will not be eliminated by the removal of private property. You don't have to be a property owner to be a self-absorbed dick that doesn't care about other people. If people want to make sure everybody has a livi…

There's a difference between "rawr, property ownership makes people dicks" and "property owners are the ones encouraging and permitting dick behavior to happen". Straw men are silly.

"property owners are the ones encouraging and permitting dick behavior to happen" implies that people who don't own property aren't permitting dick behavior to happen. They are. They can.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#63

Post by MatthewPhillips »

njharman wrote: post #42

Most people work to get money to spend on stuff people are making. Full employment 40+ hours a week is obsolete. Consumerism is obsolete. We should all be working 10hrs/week or less and have/consume 1/10 to 1/4 of what we have/consume today. That's not gonna happen easily, but it's gonna happen . Perhaps not in my lifetime. I'm making guess that space exploitation will not ramp up in time, it might though.

Are you suggesting that 3/4th - 9/10th of spending is on luxury goods?

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#64

Post by tsotha »

>Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

It's a little more complicated than that. The economy is a huge, complicated machine. The reason we have enough stuff is it mostly works to convince people go get up when the alarm goes off and go do something they'd rather not do instead of fishing or playing video games. If we start just giving people money because we can afford it we will quickly be unable to afford it.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#65

Post by jbooth »

ojbyrne wrote: post #9
efalcao wrote: post #5

It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs." Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business. After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspape…

You're not considering the second order effects. Multiple competitors appear to compete with craigslist (either head to head or picking off the most attractive niches). Market grows, profits fall. Are we better off? Just look at the service. Before we had tiny little text ads in the back pages of newspapers, now we have pictures, directions, the ability to search and sort, etc... clearly the service is better. And I…

There's no way that there's a comparable level of jobs. You know how many people the newspaper industry used to employ nationwide? Craigslist had substantially less than 100 last I heard (maybe they've grown a bit), pushing a way larger volume of classifieds, without any expensive correspondents or any of that news crap.

As the original commentator stated, bringing their jobs back would be silly make-work now that they're obsolete, nobody's suggesting that. But it does present a problem.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#66

Post by [deleted] »

Supermighty wrote: post #61
felipemnoa wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If getting a job at wages you are willing to pay means that the person will still not be able to meet any of its monetary obligations it pretty much means that the person is , for all practical purposes, still unemployed. Why work for slave wages if the outcome is the same. Better stay home and not be taken advantage off. How do this people live with no income? Most likely family or government assistance.

Chicken and egg. If the workers can't pay rent the market will correct rent down. It's that it takes too long to correct and someone's bound to be evicted before that happens.

[deleted]

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#67

Post by colanderman »

ippisl wrote: post #49
ryandvm wrote: post #29

It's a fact that computers/automation are going to continue to obsolete human jobs. Nothing short of a technological apocalypse is going to reverse that. And I agree that we shouldn't really lament the reality that a trucker who used to spend 50 hours a week vacuously staring at the highway no longer has to do that. But that's a triumph. One more human mind freed up for greater accomplishments. That said, I'm dubious…

Without some regulation , why would the work week become shorter ? for many people , working a 40 hour work week barely covers their expenses. why would they want to work less ?

I've always thought that a 30 hr work week should be regulated, forcing employees to demand higher wages in order to survive, forcing employers to raise wages, and forcing CEOs to be paid less, thus reducing the income gap.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#68

Post by MrFoof »

nextparadigms wrote: post #28
efalcao wrote: post #5

It's very interesting to think about cases where digital darlings have "killed jobs." Before: Thousands of jobs all over the country working for the classified section of a newspaper. Marginally profitable business. After: Craigslist destroys that whole market. Tons of jobs lost and the revenues shift to one company. Hugely profitable business, but probably a smaller total market than used to exist with just newspape…

You're thinking of industries in terms of how many people each employ. If one tech paradigm changes one industry from employing 1 million people, to employing just 100,000, does that mean we are worse off? Not really, because when that happens there are usually more markets and businesses created adjacent to that industry. The Internet did bring Craiglist, which did end up killing a major part of the newspaper indust…

I think the issue is the pronounced effect of market disruption.

In your example, if an industry is disrupted to where it now employs 100K instead of 1M people, the problem that arises for the short term is up to 900K people will be without employment for some duration. Eventually new jobs will be created and we'll be back to relative equilibrium, but that takes time.

In an ideal situation, these dips could be more quickly counteracted, but realistically the market isn't so efficient in which that would ever be possible, so other systems need to exist to support individuals until the market reaches equilibrium again.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#69

Post by randomdata »

philwelch wrote: post #3

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace. And, more to the point, a toll collector isn't necessarily bright enough to be a toll robot technician. Sometimes prog…

> We have not enough engineers and too many workers without useful skills, or in many cases the ability to gain them.

Separation of concerns is our current solution to that problem.

In software development, for example, good developers are hard to find, so we split the job up to add a designer role into the mix. Still finding it hard to find good people, we're now seeing the UX role come in. By giving each person less to do, the knowledge required to the job is reduced. You don't have to be a genius to be a part of the team.

In agriculture, another industry I am close to, you have the same thing. One person drives the tractor, one person tends to the animals, one person repairs the equipment, etc. because it is hard to find a good farmhand that can do it all.

We will eventually see the same shift for robotics as they become more and more prevalent. You'll have one person to diagnose the problem, one person to replace the part, etc. as the labour needs dictate.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#70

Post by silverbax88 »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #57
silverbax88 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote, which is incredibly apt, does not blame crime on property law, but rather, short-sightedness and greed.

"power structure of self-absorbed property owners" implies that people who don't own property aren't self-absorbed, or that the power structure of property owners is responsible for greed, unemployment, and undereducation. Otherwise, why mention a power structure of property owners?

Mentioning the existence of a power structure of property owners does not automatically include all property owners.
Post reply on HN