251–260 of 400 posts
The thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to billions of government contracts…
The thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to billions of government contracts…
Ford offering higher pay and better working hours were for employee retention which was important at the time.
It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the…
Neither computers nor cars, nor office nor photoshop decreased the amount of available jobs...
I think we're past the point where technology is making new jobs -- all that low hanging fruit has been gone for decades now. Growth now is all about optimization.
The thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to billions of government contracts…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job. Or it allowed the employee to shift to more valuable, interesting work rather than menial tasks that could easily be done by a computer.
I would disagree with the inference that menial tasks are automated and interesting work isn’t. I can clearly see a future where the pleasure is automated away leaving the stressful uncomfortable tasks to the human.
About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company. I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20 hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what materials they needed. It was all based on data we had: inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount of her help, I'd automated the whole t…
> That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job. It's effectively a form of the broken window fallacy [0]. You don't actually have a closed system when you say a "job was removed". The company one way or another got more efficient - more widgets were manufactured per $ spent. It might be tiny but this saving was then passed on to every downstream purchaser of the widgets…
So a company used technology to automate someone out of a job but some downstream company isn't also going to do that with their new money?
The reason technology lead to more jobs is because it created exponential growth. The lesson of the last 200 years is that we can grow indefinitely. But that is already falling apart. The growth that is happening now is optimization. And it's happening at every level of society and it's not good for workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumption here is that an AI with IQ 100 could do anything a human with an IQ of 100 could do, only cheaper. But that's just averages. Really it would do half the things better and half worse, and then people have jobs doing the things that it does worse. That would continue until it doesn't do anything worse, which may or may not ever happen, but if it did and we're all still alive then the result would be post…
The power structures will never allow it. The conditions for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for some time now. We will simply end up with a a planetary ruling class that lives opulently while the other 99% live in abject poverty.
Consider, for example, that every politician lives and dies by his constituents employment metrics.
If population is genuinely unhappy with arrangement they DO vote for change. If they are extremely unhappy - they vote for drastic change.
The thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to billions of government contracts…
The jobs robots replace aren’t good for the human soul
This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality, plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home shopping. "The world's second-largest priv…
The 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They has 1000 people in India tagging the videos after the fact for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren't watching in real time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon. It wasn't so much the jobs that shifted there as the customers, and the reason for that is that Amazon had better prices. Then people complained about the jobs they did offer because they're mechanistic and exhausting, so they automate them and then people complain about that. But that too should result in lower prices -- Amazon's retail operation doesn't…
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.