Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

Let hope history continues to repeat itself again and again when it comes to creating new jobs to replace the old.

I can't imagine it won't, at least the next couple times.

But each time, it seems, takes less and less time (we were farmers for thousands of years, hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years but the industrial revolution is only a couple hundred years old).

And when we can no longer use humans? I don't know, but it seems that the only way we can ever end up in that situation is if we have achieved general ai, which is to say that we will be at the cusp of the singularity.

The industrial revolution may have made the work horse obsolete, but it had only one use. Humans have many.

If we ever get to the point that jobs aren't replaced that would mean that all work isn't needed so the typical rules of capitalism no longer apply.

Capitalism is just a mechanism for allocating resources, it's not any kind of moral judgment on anything.

It's more subtle than that; capitalism is to economics as thermodynamics is to physics. It doesn't matter what "system" you adopt, no economy can sustainably expend more wealth than it creates, just as there can be no perpetual motion machine. Capitalists are people who recognize this basic truth and act accordingly, equivalent to engineers who use the laws of physics to create machines. But what do we call people who claim to have invented perpetual motion...?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com