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Comment by jayess | Hacker News Reader

The world economy was once 100% subsistence and farming. Now it's, what, 1%? At least in industrialized countries.

What happened to those other 99%? OMG they must be living in slums paycheck to paycheck.

Workers moved from agriculture to industrial manual production as farming tools and machinery became more efficient. Then workers moved from industrial manual production to more mentally demanding work like radiologists and web designers as industrial automation became more capable. Now AI is taking over these more mind-based tasks.

The onus is on you to explain which entirely new sectors of the economy are suddenly going to spring into existence to provide jobs for people whose skills can't compete with those of ever more capable machines.

I'm not sure why new sectors need to suddenly "spring into existence" as though we are facing an inflection point.

Automation is something that's been happening for hundreds of years, and any automation that people could do last year was done already.

I don't understand why there is this feeling that there is a backlog and therefore automation is sneaking up on us to put everybody out of work next week.

Perhaps there is too much handwaving about the "technological singularity".

There is a story on HN right now about how 10 000 people lost their jobs at Foxconn, being replaced by robotics. If the evidence is "evident" shouldn't we proceed to look for solutions?

I don't understand the relevance of your response to my post, and wonder if you meant to reply to a parent. We are in the thread about Foxconn, talking about implications.

My point was that at a macro level, automation seems to be a steady process that's gone on for much longer than any of us have been alive. But right now, it seems fashionable to assume a sudden discontinuous increase in the rate of automation is right around the corner. This only makes sense to me if there is a lot of "low hanging fruit" that people have not been automating until now. Which I think is implausible.

Rather than an "inflection point", I would think of it as a phase transition between the phase where new jobs are being created fast enough to replace those lost due to automation, and the phase where new jobs aren't being created fast enough.

Also, instead of a thinking in terms of a "backlog", I feel like the average human only has a roughly fixed amount of ability, while hardware+software is increasing in capability all the time, such that it might become more cost-effective than any human worker for any economically valuable task eventually.

Yes, humans are very flexible, and the same body+mind that can live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can also live a modern office worker's lifestyle, but we're never going to be able to outrun a car, or beat a specialised chess AI.

There is no law of economics which says that the economy will always create jobs which humans can do better and cheaper than machines, unfortunately.

It seems to me that you just did literally describe an inflection point. Regardless of what you call it, as I think about it, in my previous post I ought to have used the word discontinuity, because an inflection point isn't a crisis. This article on Foxconn is about a discontinuity which is the sort of thing that makes people worry, but on a global scale, I don't see why we should expect a global dislocation from automation any time soon.

Because one is already happening? Full employment has become "folks who used to be engineers and scientists and office managers, are working the counter at a fast food joint ". And those jobs are going next, apparently.

There's no rule that says jobs will get 'created' at all. It hasn't happened for factory workers the last 10 years.

All three of those professions work symbiotically with computers and automation. It's hard for me to see them as competing.

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