Comment by subhobroto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by subhobroto | Hacker News Reader

Technical innovation moves and concentrates the savings to the top of the chain.

Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in the long term.

Technical innovation permanently removes/drastically minimizes OpEx for those willing to put up with significant capital expenditure (in building the Technology in the first place): but once done, those jobs are gone.

It made mining, telephone, retail, manufacturing etc companies drastically minimize their dependence on human labor. These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.

Next up is transportation.

Most governments dont want to be bothered with transportation and run it inefficiently.

New companies are capitalizing on this to establish future oligopolies: https://www.quora.com/What-controls-help-ensure-the-growing-...

Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.

Electric (and autonomous) vehicles are going to be the next PC era that is going to change the world for decades and build the new billionaires.

> These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.

This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;)

And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.

Well if you dont generate value in society, what will society do with you?

Or any system for that matter?

I may not personally support such a view, but from a purely functional stand point, you are about as much value as you earn and can therefore afford.

Isn't that an incredibly individualist standpoint - that nobody has duty nor obligation towards others?

Well, the problem then becomes "what do all these folks who have no 'value' to a society do to that society when they realize have no 'value'".

That's probably also a problem from a "purely functional standpoint", but it's compounded by folks who think there is some kind of natural law that says "value" === "economic productivity" when that's only true for a subset of societies.

Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed for more and more automation?

Your value is that you're human being. Let the machines be enslaved to producing goods and services for the humans.

> Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed for more and more automation?

That's the capitalist way of thinking about people. Old fashioned or not, it dominates the lives of most people on the planet, and the value of most lives can be summed to a precise monetary amount - that being the value of the labor extracted from them by society over their lifetime, as determined by the market.

We should be considering what to do about the likelihood that most people made redundant by automation will simply be left valueless to society. No one seems to actually be trying to use automation to build a utopia and free everyone from the struggles of work. Rather, automation is allowing the elite to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of supporting society through compensating human beings for work.

The "functionalist" truth is not that these individuals add no value, it's that they generally add negative value. When you're unemployed with no job prospects and unable to support yourself or your family, chances are you are now "functionally counterproductive" to society (crime, homelessness, etc). Any ethical society (a society which does not kill or imprison people for this reason) should, from a "functional" standpoint, do its best to make these people productive again.

Theoretically yes we should make them functional again.

But re-spilling takes longer than expected, doesn't happen very successfully across the board and is effectively a huge hole in that theory.

And that's if the people are close enough to the skill domain to manage the jump.

Side note- people underestimate how variables govern human learning,

Native ability, language skills, previous success with studies, self discipline, presence of children, health, spare time, non competing obligations, nutrition.

We are all - even the exceptional among us - essentially earning dividends on the long history of human advancements to this point. Society should compensate people from whom it has taken the opportunity to hunt/gather/homestead as part of the cost of developing a complex civilization. The question is what is the best form for this compensation to take. Society exists for the benefit of the humans who comprise it.

>from a purely functional stand point, you are about as much value as you earn

From a purely functional standpoint, most income isn't earned - it's derived from rents.

There is a good case to be made for redistribution of rents equally and only allowing income to be earned, though.

With a sufficiently complicated system involving sufficient capex to get started, you can avoid having to compete with anyone but the companies who started around the same time as you, at least for several years. Startups try to build network effects into their products to build this up - many businesses invest lots in physical infrastructure.

You might not be able to get away with charging twice what a taxi used to cost, but you can certainly make a very healthy margin, and healthier still as you buy up competitors.

I am curious if anyone has done an analysis to see how much of the capital expenditures going to automation goes to labor vs profits/return on capital.

I could definitely see the case that almost none of it is going to labor in the end, but it would be interesting to see a real study.

"Our recent research casts doubt on the hypothesis that technology-driven developments were a major factor behind rising inequalities in advanced countries.

Let me start with some facts about jobs. Both the European Union and the United States are characterised by strikingly similar labour force developments. In both regions, there has been a decline in the number of jobs for workers with low levels of educational attainment over the past 25 years. Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous increase in jobs for workers with tertiary education, and this is the only job category that expanded after 2008, even in several countries that were hit hard by the recent global and European financial and economic crises. While underemployment, when a worker takes a job for which they are over-qualified, is a prevailing phenomenon, it tends to be temporary.

If a greater share of jobs are only open to tertiary-educated workers, it could contribute to increasing inequality, if tertiary-educated workers earn ever more, relative to lower educated colleagues. Data shows that this has been the case in the United States and China, and to a much more limited extent in Germany. However, exactly the opposite has happened in many other countries during the past two decades, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden and Japan. In these countries the so called ‘skills premium’ has actually fallen."

http://bruegel.org/2016/12/explaining-inequality/

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