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Comment by jganetsk | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly wrong. Automation happened already, 200 years ago. It upended society. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Things changed dramatically, and nothing remotely of that scale is occurring now.

We are suffering today not because of technological progress, but rather the contrary: the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally come to a grinding halt. Let's stop denying this. The stream of lifechanging breakthrough inventions of the 20th century, from A (antibiotics) to Z (zippers), have ended. As a result, we now suffer from secular stagnation. [1]

This is why people can't get jobs. The answer is Keynesian spending, and the most fair kind of Keynesian spending is basic income. Call it a "Keynesian dividend".

[1] http://larrysummers.com/2016/02/17/the-age-of-secular-stagna...

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I disagree that it's "exactly wrong", though I at the same time agree with the secular stagnation concept. It's important to remember that past revolutions in automation have destroyed one field of labor while creating another. For example, the industrial revolution destroyed hand and muscle-driven labor and replaced it with factory labor. In the US we then went from an industrial economy driven by factory jobs to a service economy driven by knowledge-based labor.

Automation today is now destroying service economy jobs, but it's not clear, at least to me, what new sector is ramping up to pick up the displacement slack. The tech sector isn't going to have enough jobs for everyone getting automated away, and this time around automation is unique in that it's attacking pretty much everything all at once. Human drivers are going to be displaced by autonomous vehicles at the same time as financial advisers are being displaced by wealth allocation algorithms at the same time as warehouse workers are being displaced by picker robots, etc.

> It's important to remember that past revolutions in automation have destroyed one field of labor while creating another.

That's exactly right. We've been creating work to keep people busy for 200 years in many more ways than you mention. Consumerism. Marketing. Bureaucracy. We have one industry that makes people sick (food) and another industry that makes people healthy (healthcare). The twin peaks of the sickness and health industries can grow indefinitely, especially in the USA. We have industries that make plastic casings to wrap goods, just so we can sell goods to consumers, who unwrap and immediately dispose the plastic, so that another industry (sanitation) can take them away.

We basically have a society which continuously breaks glass windows and then fixes them. It's all, in some sense, pure dead weight, just to keep people employed.

So why should this stop now?

The New Economy: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20161217/drug-firms...

Think of the additional economic boost from treating these people in hospitals, or even better, prisons! Countless "jobs" will be created!

Because we are in the process of automating away all jobs except consumption this time around. In the past as those new "busywork" industries popped up, human workers filled the new roles. But now we're approaching the point where every new busywork job can be filled by machines, which are cheaper than employees.

Health and food are actually a great example. We've already automated away most farm jobs (in the US at least) and a lot of the food production & prep jobs for junk food type things. And now we're starting to see in the healthcare space that software can reduce loads on doctors, for example ML-based interpretation of X-rays, automated patient record tracking, etc. Fitbit is the tip of iceberg for what's possible in at-home health monitoring based on software instead of humans. I would argue that while the sickness and health industries can grow indefinitely, the number of jobs in each cannot.

We have always been in the process of automating all jobs. This is the age-old battle between labor and capital.

Completely agree. We're just now in a position to actually do it in the foreseeable future instead of it being a distant pipe dream.

Even jobs in the tech sector are likely under threat. Remember that guy a few weeks ago showing an AI platform be built to design logos for customers? We're not far from having AI build our web pages, and then simple web apps, and then probably native apps, and before long, finding and patching bugs in software, and eventually writing the software itself

Even finance is being upended actively by automation and AI.

The narrative will follow the "drug war." When it's the poor people (factory workers::blacks), they're just "losers" who need to try harder or should be locked away for decades. When it's happening in upper middle and middle class suburbia (opioid epidemic::white collar automation), then it's a "public health crisis that commands our empathy!"

You don't need much in the way of AI to design and build simple web pages. Existing templates and wizards already do that; those jobs were automated away years ago.

Patching all but the simplest software bugs will require real AGI. Understanding a bug and the side effects of a patch goes way beyond current AI technology, and there is still no defined R&D path which is likely to produce an AGI.

We already are automated. It's called C. Python. Java. Go.

How many programmers would it take to write Windows in Assembly?

It's automated to a certain level, sure - but it's silly to assume we've reached maximum amount of automation possible in the space.

I agree that secular stagnation and the global savings glut are the real problems but Keynesian fiscal spending is supposed to be periodic to counter cycles. It cannot fix long term secular trends.

A worldwide monetary policy change that keeps real interest rates sufficiently negative to be in line with private market rates is the only real solution.

> The stream of lifechanging breakthrough inventions of the 20th century, from A (antibiotics) to Z (zippers), have ended

I agree, but this only leads to more questions: why? And is it permanent?

I think we are in a temporary lull. Finance people, in the vain of JP Morgan, have gotten very good at controlling the social processes around both physical resources and human output. They keep most people tired and scared to change jobs, so they can be made to focus on production. The rest who are actively problem solving despite those pressures, the finance folks try to steer them towards a maze where big bets are made and equity changes hands often.

We were bison, and now we're cattle. There's more meat, but less frolicking, and no semblance of any kind of ecosystem that produced so many bison-y moments.

Is it forever? I don't think so. We're only fairly recently getting lots of brains trying to discover tools for doing things outside of finance. And still, it's a trickle. Look at all the beautiful brains on this message board, whose output is getting fed into the feedlots of VCs and Paul Graham.

> I agree, but this only leads to more questions: why? And is it permanent?

Our rapid technological progress in the last 2 centuries was an anomaly. We have 200,000 years of history as a species, most of which did not have nearly the same level of progress. The burden is on to you to explain what made those 2 centuries so great.

> the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally come to a grinding halt

Fine, I can buy that. But stagnant productivity alone doesn't generate low employment. How do you explain low employment then?

Employment is not low, so we don't need to explain it. Despite what you were told by some people at election time, the US jobless rate is 4.9% which is internationally low and has been roughly the same for 60 years. In the golden 1950s that rate was down to 4% and had a peak of 10% in the early 1980s. US employment is pretty darn stable.

Secular stagnation

> the rapid technological progress of the 20th century that brought tremendous economic prosperity to humanity has finally come to a grinding halt

Nah. The mother of all tech progressions, AI, is just kicking in.

I don't understand how HN so easily handwaves away these enormous problems with "basic income". What do you do when the currency becomes completely worthless?

You will have to explain why you think currency would become worthless. That would be a monetary problem, not a fiscal one. Basic income is financed with debt and taxes, and monetary policy remains a separate concern.

We have already done things like basic income in the USA:

- Economic Stimulus Act of 2008

- Earned Income Tax Credit

Please provide some sort of argumentation or data.

Not sure if I agree with your analysis, but I certainly agree with your solution.

That's my point. I have a contrarian analysis. You have the conventional analysis. I think the conventional wisdom is wrong. It's frustrating that people just throw out economics and history and go for some sort of post-modern analysis of "things are so different now. No one could ever have imagined robots! We can't apply classical economics to the situation" Yes they could have, yes they did, and yes we can.

Thank you! Finally someone who gets it.

IMHO these articles are fake news, journalists love beating the Automation is killing jobs drum.

IT certainly is changing and outsourcing is swings and roundabouts. But there's more work than ever.

Automation is "changing the world" provided you're finding excuses for why there are fewer jobs with worse pay that exculpate the 1%.

Suddenly the American oligarchy loses its faith in automation once you discuss potentially inflationary increases to public spending.

If we really are in an automation renaissance public spending could be ramped up massively and the potentially inflationary impact would be offset by all of the cost savings from replacing people with robots.

If.

>IMHO these articles are fake news

Oh god, stop with this in every article.

This isn't "fake"; it isn't even "news".

News is either fake or not. A researched opinion piece isn't "fake" because you disagree with the conclusions. It might be wrong, but it isn't "fake".

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