Many CEOs believe technology will make people 'largely irrelevant' | Hacker News Reader

Many CEOs believe technology will make people 'largely irrelevant'

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17 pointstroopkevin24 comments

Hmm. If CEOs do make people largely irrelevant in the workplace, who do they believe will be buying their products?

Former staff may struggle to buy Nike and Apple toys, if they're now surviving in the gig economy, at some fraction of their former wage.

The consumers will probably be the rising global middle class.

Rising after the jobs they are rising on are filled by robots? The "rising middle class" is not some abstract guarantee upon which we can rely regardless of what happens, it is a result of many complicated forces interacting, and we're talking about specifically nuking what is arguably the most important element of those forces.

Who needs people buying your products, if you own a means of production that will never rebel?

Anyone who finds their means of production needs replacement parts or labor to maintain the means of production in excess of what they can personally provide. Otherwise entropy will take your means of production from you.

> who do they believe will be buying their products

Frustratingly, it doesn't matter.

Each CEO may be convinced that there won't be enough solvent consumers around for everybody, after everybody has gone full automation. Yet because there'd be a huge upside to being the only one to fully automate, everybody knows that somebody else will go there and destroy everything anyway. You might as well try to be an early adopter, reap some benefit to stow away safely, before everything goes to hell.

In other words, as fine a specimen of game theoretic dilemma as any.

I think the article is about employees not people in general. But they live in a dream world. As a programmer the likelihood of my livelihood vanishing any time soon is nil. Good luck building a robot to put up with the terrible decision making here and figuring out how to simultaneously build competing plans from battling VPs.

Perhaps AI will also automate-away the C-level execs and choose the plan which best ensures its own prolonged survival and prosperity.

I can only imagine what sort of products this will create, perhaps ones which actively destroy those of competitors which they find on your network.

My own dystopian prediction (and extrapolating from trends) is that more and more of the population will enter the services economy:

- in zero-sum activities like advertising

- providing services for the mega-rich (there will always be demand for humans as servants, at the very least as a status signal and luxury indicator)

- a lot of work in social and medical services (there's an expected shortage of nurses and elderly caregivers)

- and cutthroat competitive non-productive activities like entertainment (which, if you want to be optimistic, would mean more finer arts and stuff, but it probably means more youtuber-style stuff).

- Edit: and other labor-intensive "luxury" products, as shown by the rise of Etsy, craft breweries, organics, etc. http://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/manual-labor-luxury-...

There will be a lot of unemployment or on-demand employment or freelancing, unless governments start regulating (I hope not, I'd rather have something like basic income than make-work).

Social services is one area where there can be growth, and create self worth, see this HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037810 , and particularly this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13039672

Edit: One thing I'm NOT worried about is general AI taking over ALL human activities - as Alan Perlis once quipped "A year spent in Artificial Intelligence is enough to make one believe in God."

https://cs.calvin.edu/documents/intelligent_machines

People really are responsible for developing and nourishing their own careers. Just yesterday I recommended Tyler Pearson's "The End of Jobs...." to one of my nieces and a FREI d who is struggling to be his own boss. I have mostly worked in the gig economy as an independent consultant, and having your own business really does make you less fragile economically.

AI and robots will help people concentrate on more important tasks, instead of doing repetitive work. What about if most of us are still peasants, just like hundreds of years ago?

Given the effects of (economic) insecurity has on cognitive behavior/ability, what could a group of people with the same kind of stability as feudal peasants do that a program couldn't do better, more reliably and cheaper in a decade or two?

A little known fact you might find interesting: in the dark ages, 'peasants' had much more wealth in the bartering system. That is they kept more of what they produced. Except for some outbreaks of decease, it was a great time to live. Peasants were screwed over at the end of the dark ages with centralized monetary systems that sucked up the rewards from local production. Bartering often was made to be illegal, and the coin of the realm was mandated by law.

The way I was taught, it sucked to be a peasant in the medieval ages. They had to work for their masters AND the church, before working for themselves. Whatever little they kept could be bartered, I guess. But I definitely wouldn't call it "a great time to live".

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/medieval-england/the-li...

They paid a tithe (tenth?) to the king and a quarter to their lord? I pay much more than that in taxes today.

But of course my standard of living is orders of magnitude more settled and safe. Infrastructure, law and order, soap, the germ theory of disease all work to make me likely to live to my allotted lifespan.

re: "a great time to be alive": compared to the later "enlightenment" period were serfs were separated from the results of their hard work. Douglas Rushkoff talks about this in his very nice book "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus." The author of "The Crash of 2016" also talks about how serfs were better off during the Dark Ages.

I really fear the future. Imagine an average person will get some sort of "basic income" or worse goods/services "for free" from the government. And the average joe will have no way of getting richer (acquiring more resources to buy better stuff).

Maybe most of the stuff he is going to get will be good enough anyway...but...he will be unable to make choices for himself. Sounds like a socialist nightmare.

But I bet we will solve this with taxation and duties anyway.

Another long term trend is reducing risk adjusted ROI. If a rich person get's say 0.1% above inflation before taxes wealth will simply become vastly less useful over time. Because it's really compound interest not wealth that controls our society.

Honestly, if food, energy, medicine, housing, transportation, and non branded stuff all becomes cheaper due to automation we may see a more friendly society. People will still compete in games if nothing else, but seeing the cycle of good grades to good school to good job to better job to retire and make art with you spare time is pointless if you can just 'retire' and make art out of the gate.

PS: Remember modern capitalism is still a very young system, it's unlikely to be stable long term.

Then wouldn't anyone with access to capital become CEO of a one-man company? And who buys the product?

Replacing jobs with robots will benefit the economy and society. This has been shown again and again throughout history. I is _not_ different this thime, you dear reader are not unique.

People want to work because they want to feel useful. Many people try to farm on their own knowing that it's probably cheaper and faster to buy from your local supermarket. 90% of us are not capable of doing a meaningful research.Are we redundant ? Even programmers are solving a non-existent problems.The society is already getting sick of globalization and corps more powerful than nations. This will either get worse or collapse.

We know the statement "More technology always means more better jobs for horses" is both silly in theory and demonstrably not true. Could you provide an argument for why it is true when we replace horses with humans? I'm aware that the economy as a whole will be better off, but if suddenly a quarter, a half or even 90% of the population becomes superfluous, it'll be debatable that society will be better off.

I generally agree with this, but would caution you to look into "the resource curse".

In this case, countries with large amounts of resources are terrible places for the average inhabitant, because the rulers can get very rich without having to educate or placate them, instead they need a tiny number of people to work the mines/oilfields. And can control them with guns bought with the the wealth they accrue from sales to other countries.

Avoiding this scenario, except with robots owned by the rich and lots of useless poor people, would be wise I think.

This has been shown again and again throughout history.

Only if you look at things with a long enough time horizon. The Luddites where correct in as much as the quality of their life and the life of their children on the whole didn't benefit, even if the life of their grand children might have been better.

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