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That video was actually briefly on the HN front page. I’m still wondering why some people apparently flagged so that it was quickly relegated to page 3 or so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172461 No one flagged it.
CGP Grey recently put out a video along very similar lines. Worth 15 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL7...
For example, within the first few minutes they show this graph: http://i.imgur.com/IDXYI9Y.png
But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows this: http://i.imgur.com/BPNyjM8.png
They've excluded other industries in forming their basis and it's clearly cherry picking to fit a narrative. I like the idea of a fully-automated utopia as much as the next person, but jobs are simply not going to disappear - they're going to shift industries.
CGP Grey recently put out a video along very similar lines. Worth 15 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL7...
There is some serious bias with this video. For example, within the first few minutes they show this graph: http://i.imgur.com/IDXYI9Y.png But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows this: http://i.imgur.com/BPNyjM8.png They've excluded other industries in forming their basis and it's clearly cherry picking to fit a narrative. I like the idea of a fully-automated utopia as much as the next person, but jobs are simp…
I see your objection that to consider agriculture's decline indicative of the future of labor in general could be considered cherry-picking, but I think the video at least attempts to respond to this charge, explaining why its author does not feel other industries will "pick up the slack" in the same way in the future as happened in the past for jobs lost to automation.
[For what it's worth, while enamored of the dream of leisure-society utopia, I am quite skeptical of the author's assessment of the current state of progress on various forms of automation (and thus, a fortiori, of the projected speed at which such automation will take off as ubiquitous in the near future). But I did want to defend them against the charge of not even considering the idea that jobs will simply shift to other industries.]
If a panel of experts are evenly split on their opinions about the future of jobs, it seems to me that nobody really knows what is going to happen. It's one thing to point to how historically new technology created new jobs to replace those it displaced, but I get the feeling that this time it might be very different. All the rules go out the window when technological acceleration reaches a certain point. I'm not say…
Economist Louis Kelso ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kelso ) was talking about many of these issues in the 1950's. He proposed the concepts behind Binary Economic Theory ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_economics ) which helped usher into law the Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP). Whether or not you agree with it, it is certainly interesting to learn about. It isn't something that is widely taught.
"Kelso claimed that in a truly free market wages would tend to fall over time, with all the benefits of technological progress accruing to capital owners"
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There will be a bright future for our capital owning population. There is a weak correlation between old people and capital ownership and easy to mistake the two if inferring from the age axis, e.g. person X owns more capital at 50 than at 25. However, this doesn't generalize well when doing a cross section at a given age, see for example the average savings for a 50 year old, which is a meager $43,797 http://www.sta…
Under capitalism, it's good to own capital, naturally. You can start by saving a $100.
While this increases the total output of society, it also increases inequality.
We already have in place mechanisms to deal with inequality, namely income tax and welfare. As the total output of society grows, we will be able to afford more generous kinds of welfare, until eventually we probably settle on a negative income tax scheme.
Note that a correctly designed welfare system wouldn't result in lots of people living on welfare, but rather everyone working fewer hours.
So I imagine that the future could be quite good, as long as our methods for redistributing wealth are able to keep pace with technological change (and there are some great examples to follow in the Western world, e.g. Scandinavia, Australia and NZ)
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I don't understand why the video goes through the history of technology reducing the need for types of labor and doesn't acknowledge that we keep thinking of new things to do. The closest he comes to making an argument that we won't keep making new jobs is that we didn't keep making new jobs _for horses_ which seems to me like arguing that we didn't keep making new jobs for spears and hammers and pencils. I have conc…
In the video he says that the new jobs we have created do not make up a significant portion of all jobs.
So then, yes, he listed a lot of jobs that will go away, insinuated it's basically all of them (with which I agree, but no argument was made), and then took the strawman "well maybe you think creative jobs won't go away" and then defeated that strawman by incorrectly assuming creativity is limited to artists, poets, directors, and actors and said "there can't be such a thing as a poem and painting based economy", which I think is what you are referring to. That's just as dishonest as the horse analogy. It assumes without argument that creative people won't look at the new robotic world around them and find new things to create, or at the humans around them eager to work and find new ways to utilize them, all with the assistance of AIs and robots.
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Peoples' wants and desires are infinite. As long as there are things to desire, there will be jobs to do.
Is there any convincing data on this point? I know that it was an economist that uttered this theory, so I'll assume good faith when it comes to research effort or at least diligent argumentation on the behalf of this statement. But without anything to back it up, it just comes off as something it's proponents take for granted as a truism. "Consumerism" (which goes beyond "stuff" and materialism, at least here) has b…
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"post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US household income on their own, living in a world mostly surrounded by other affluent individuals working in a similar field, all in jobs with increasingly flexible work hours, better benefits and nearly unlimited job prospects. The world only looks like it's movin…
If labor is effectively free (because robots don't get paid) then I don't think that the products of that labor would be particularly scarce. Even material costs are primarily the labor cost to extract or recycle a material.
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Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world. Horses have never created their own jobs using their own ingenuity. We do not as a society place value on the employment rate of horses. Our economy does not depend on horses purchasing goods and services. Or social structure does not depend on horses feeling a sense of meaning in their lives. We didn't react…
> Horses, to my understanding, do not have a seemingly insatiable desire for novelty and to create a new world. Dark as it may seem, many people would say the same about most human consumers in this country. Looking at the most successful creations in the past century, most are made by corporations. While people have been spearheading those efforts so far, the whole novel creation process would be automated if and wh…
Do you have any idea how the banking industry and B2B operations work? People. Lots and lots of people. Way less automation than low-margin retail junk, which itself is way less automated than most people think it is.
You have it exactly backwards: It's not that the economy is run by robots that are not interested in you. Robots are not interested in the economy, but the economy is very interested in you -- money is just a way of keeping score.
