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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

You’d also remove the way for lots of people to make a living.

The unemployed only know that making a living in a lousy industry is better than not making any living at all.

That's exactly the point. Humans rely on jobs, what happens when robots take over?

We don't actually rely on jobs, we just force one another to work to satisfy our principles of fairness. In theory we could agree on a different notion of fairness that doesn't require everybody to work, we just choose not to.

What are some potential alternatives?

Yes, before industrialization, the US was filled with entrepreneurs in the form of farmers and ranchers. Here's some land, go live. Families would grow what they needed to survive, then sell the rest for money to buy stuff they couldn't make themselves. It was fairly self sustaining, but vulnerable to drought, etc.

I think one of the problems today is there really isn't a way to self sustain anymore with just land and some hard work, so we need jobs to survive.

FWIW, I think you may be under-selling "We just choose not to."

Human principles of fairness are based very heavily on social constructs of tribe and group survival that predate civilization by 10^5 to 10^7 years. Human thought is extremely malleable, I think the human psychology jury is still out on precisely how malleable "fairness" is.

That having been said, it feels like if we could start by ratcheting most people from a 40-hour week to a 30-hour week without cutting their pay, that'd square with the gut feeling of fairness. ;)

I agree that fairness will pose some short-run concerns. But, consider that it probably didn't make sense to early hunter-gatherers to work themselves to an early death in order to accumulate or bequeath hoards of any of the materials (raw or processed) or tools at their disposal. It seems certain they still had a sense of fairness, which suggests the triggers of that gut feeling are themselves quite malleable.

One legacy of agricultural and industrial production has been the devaluing of just about all "non-productive" activity. A broad re-valuation of what we spend our time on might be a good place to start re-calibrating our sense of fairness.

Why do we assume that robots will replace all existing work, or that the jobs being automated won't be replaced by other forms of work or income that don't rely on jobs that can be automated?

I think it's a bit sensationalist to assume that all work everywhere will be automated.

Even if we get to the point where that happens, capitalism as we know it would crumble if there is literally only automated jobs and robots owners.

Well, my reasoning goes like this:

1. Industrial revolution made obsolete physical work. The physical work that is done today (for instance, blue collar workers, waiters) is about mental capacities, not physical.

2. The brain is a physical object that process information (no magic).

3. At some point we will able to create machine that process information better than the human brain, making humans obsoletes.

If we accept that premises, the only question left is "when?".

>>"Even if we get to the point where that happens, capitalism as we know it would crumble if there is literally only automated jobs and robots owners."

I agree with that.

"capitalism as we know it would crumble if there is literally only automated jobs and robots owners."

Exactly! What happens after capitalism?

I think we'll find, if we stop hitting them with stupid-sticks in childhood (I'm looking at you organized educational systems) and feed them well that most people are in fact interesting, intelligent, curious, and driven to express themselves in glorious self-directed vibrant creative constructive expression. (And if some of them turn out not to be, well then, we can toss 'em in a volcano.)

A "job" is not something you need. You need to contribute to society and you need support from society as well, and we currently structure that relationship primarily through jobs and "the economy" but that structure is what's going away. The question is, what to replace it with?

Automation is a good thing. From the point of view of the machines Moore's Law means that humans are becoming exponentially more valuable! (Thanks to Mark Miller for that gem.)

Unless you can do something that a machine can't be programmed to do you have a serious problem, though. What will your children be? And their children? We are deciding today what our distant descendants will be doing.

An A.I. koan:

Q: What can you do that a machine cannot? A: Could a machine answer that question?

I do not believe we are at a special tipping point in this history of automation in the economy. Automation has been removing certain jobs from the economy for thousands of years. All-in-all (certainly in the 20-21st century in the US at least) unemployment has ebbed and flowed. When automation occurs in an industry it generally allows for greater production and cheaper products which raises the standard of living of everyone. There are many new jobs that exist today that didn't exist 100 years ago or at least were in very small number. Here's a nice podcast on the topic https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-3-i-want-the-rob... :)

The way things currently are, I agree. But I think it's a bit restrictive to limit yourself to that, when you are projecting decades into the future anyway.

This is the reality ... it's happening. Industry will always optimize, and as technology marches forward, they will replace human workers with technology when it makes financial sense to do so.

The discussion should be, "what do we do when that happens"?

I think countries around the world are starting to realize that globalization while having lifted millions out of uttter poverty has now also turned its power to extract wealth toward those to whom it promised to bring greater opportunity which never came (I’m looking at you, Michael Moore’s castaway workers the industrialized world over; people who can no longer raise a family on a blue collar job because they were shipped over seas).

On a long enough timescale (assuming we don't nuke ourselves, or we choke on smog, first) ... total and all-encompassing globalization is the end-state. At that point, it will be no different than employers in the US moving from one state to another. Of course, that doesn't bode well considering we have problems even just in the US with some states having booming economies, and others having massively lagging economies ... but that's how it's gonna be

You can say that about every efficiency ever invented.

I've heard this expressed as the "Washing machine paradox."

Person comes home from a coalmine job, grumbling because there are rumors going around that the mine is going to buy a bunch of automatic conveyors and lay off half the miners. They come in through the basement entrance straight into the laundry room (people who've lived in coal country, you know how that works ;) ) and toss their grubby clothes directly into the washing machine. How are they gonna make ends meet if they get laid off, they wonder?

They do not for one second stop and consider that a scant hundred years ago, a person would have been the one doing that laundry the machine is doing right now.

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