A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

If we reach the happy situation where robots are providing us with the things we need for a good life almost automatically, why would we continue to work ourselves to the bone for additional goods and services that won't increase our happiness much? Most people would rather just work less.

In fact, our current level of economic output is enough to give every household a comfortable life, even if we worked substantially less.

Unfortunately the system is structured to maximize labour time, keep us economically insecure, and use us all as grist for the capitalist mill, rather than maximizing leisure time and quality of life.

If you improve your factory equipment to produce double the items per employee-hour at a lower unit cost, you likely won't see the demand double in proportion. Most likely you'll just eat into the market share of a competitor. Maybe some new customers will newly be able to afford the product, but once it has "taken for granted" status, even that is impossible.

And we are not increasing the number of these "taken for granted products" very quickly. As far as physical products are concerned, I can only think of the smart phone as a recent example; actually that decreased the number of those products, by obsoleting cameras and dumb phones for most people. Among internet services, advertising is the dominant money-maker, and that's a zero-sum game for eyeballs which only employs a relatively small number of people.

As more and more products and services are provided by machines, fewer and fewer people become necessary to keep things running in the background. Sure, some of the replaced people can try to come up with new things to offer, but most of them won't succeed, and the vast majority will eventually be unable to cost-effectively provide value to other humans at all.

At that point, we'll find out whether it's cheaper to feed them or shoot them.

It has been a while that demand stalls. We can see it by observing that energy (time, investment, ...) doesn't go much any more to production means, but to advertisement, marketing, new forms of distribution, and so on. Production is enough in many domains (and there is no room for newcomers, it contracts rather than develops, you just compete to take shares from someone else, not that much to contribute to a booming market), the current problem and aim of companies are to invent ways to get people to consume more and more stuff.

It's pretty simple to determine -- Who's paying the salary? Your example, of a contractor who is employed by Amazon to work on Netflix integrations for Amazon products, would count for Amazon, as the work is paid for by Amazon and is for Amazon's benefit. It wouldn't count for Netflix; we're only talking about employees whose salaries are being directly paid for by a company, not larger second-order ecosystem-type effects. That gets a lot harder. What I'm talking about is exact.

Have you been to the UK recently? :)

I don't know how much of an increase there was from about a century ago, but for the last few decades it's very much been going the other way. But the UK is something of a basket case when it comes to housing; people want to spend all their money on a mortgage.

Tangentially related, not long ago a minister suggested that people could keep a "jerry can" or petrol in their garage and was roundly mocked not only for the fire hazard, but for the casual belief that everyone has a garage.

My position is not that you're wrong, it's that most of us are missing the subtext of our technological development which is that nearly all of it is computer related and we've papered over failures in a large number of technological areas by simply not talking about them (in society, not on HN).

> Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past.

That is true. I wouldn't dispute the affect of accumulated incremental changes to existing product lines, it's meaningful.

It's true in two directions. For instance many items today are inferior goods to past goods. Here is an example.

New growth lumber is inferior to old growth lumber. Something made out of wood such as siding, framing or window/door frames will require more frequent replacement due to rot, insects, weather. The old growth equivalents lasts for decades and even centuries. Today we rely on a mixture of more frequent maintenance and often toxic additives (protective coatings) and if that doesn't work we are forced to leap to far more complex, sometimes expensive replacements e.g. UPVC, I-Joists, LVLs.

I'm not saying the technology is bad. It's great engineering ingenuity, I'm stating its requirement exists because of a failure in our ability to match or improve qualitative tree farming and botanical biotechnology.

> So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.

This is a big subject, I'll just throw one dart at you.

There is a hidden assumption. Why are your houses more energy efficient? It's because a barrel of oil doesn't cost $1 anymore.

There's a dark side to energy efficiency.

The side affects of higher insulation requirements is that houses cost more, studies on passive houses suggest 10%-20% more in the positive scenarios. The real problem though is that the most common forms of insulation offgas toxins and since houses are meant to be more air tight... The fact is that most buyers of houses and most builders of them aren't up to speed on what is required to do this sort of housing without health risks.

Right now most houses in my country, without the latest insulation requirements, suffer from moisture, mildew and mold problems, all of which is not positive for human health - this only gets worse with the new regulations because consumers don't understand the importance of hvac or building houses as holistic systems.

Most of my complaints seem to go away if we actually had a real biotech revolution.

When DNA was discovered, when Human Genome was decoded, they said the exact same things they are now saying about CRISPR, that's what troubles me.

The reason why I mentioned a Tiny House or THOW is that the comparison is much closer, I think like most countries in the past there were no planning permission or taxes on house building. A THOW too is built by the owner, but it is 200-300 sq ft and not 1200 sq ft.

The website you listed suggests a 50k modular house costs closer to 130k to install once everything is worked through. Do you believe the Sears house cost ~150-200% more in the end? Sure they had to dig wells too but I don't think that is plausible.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to argue with you in the sense that you convey in that second part of your comment, I just enjoy supposing about this particular subject.