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Comment by adamcstephens | Hacker News Reader

So how will the people who would have worked in a shop like this, afford to shop for food? In Sweden this probably isn’t as big of an issue, but not every country is as socially conscious.

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Broken window fallacy argument - we can’t artificially keep doing demonstrably less efficient things for the sake of jobs, it has never worked and never will. If it becomes a problem then we have to deal with it by finding new avenues to employ people or not need employment to live a life.

Yep, refrigerators also wreaked havoc on the "blocks of ice" delivery industry, but trying to prevent that change would have been as useless as trying to hold back the tide with your arms. The effort should be put into ensuring everyone can have decent lives in a world improved by increased efficiency, not holding back progress.

That’s assuming that efficiency is the only thing we should care about in society.

Efficiency is the reason we can have this conversation instead of standing out in a field, manually trying to coax a living out of the unforgiving soil every day. Efficiency isn't the goal, but it's one of the best tools we have for improving what a human life can be - like for example giving us enough leisure time to be able to read, have hobbies, do art or spend more time with loved ones.

There's nothing wrong with efficiency and it provides a lot of benefits, as you say. But the efficiency argument is also used to knock out local businesses in favor of big box stores and so on. Everybody likes efficiency but we should be wary of using that as the only way to measure outcomes.

I agree that a singular focus on efficiency without regard for unintended side effects or negative externalities is crazy too. "Sustainability" should be right up there with efficiency as a main tool - doing something efficiently in an unsustainable way (societally, economically or ecologically) will by definition not be efficient in the long term anyway - but our society is often organized in a way where those who benefit from short term profits are not the same as those who must bear the long term costs, so they don't balance out like ideally they should. So the effort should be put into aligning those incentives, make it unprofitable to chase short-term profits in ways that harm society - not to fight efficiency as a concept.

>like for example giving us enough leisure time to be able to read, have hobbies, do art or spend more time with loved ones.

You say that like it is a universally accepted truth, yet the American worker allegedly takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant[0]. Going even further back, prior to agriculture we likely had even more "free" time[1].

Efficiency is a goal is nice, but the modern work day does not strive for efficiency.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/american-worker-less-vacatio...

[1]: https://www.earth.com/news/farmers-less-free-time-hunter-gat...

Sure, the American ass-in-seat mentally is not efficient. The American for-profit healthcare system is not efficient. And the American way of leaving its poorer citizens to fend for themselves instead of investing in them is not efficient. That's not an indictment of America's belief in efficiency, that's an indictment of its blind belief in the market as the best source of all solutions.

> we can’t artificially keep doing demonstrably less efficient things

Well then it's a good thing adamcstephens didn't suggest that, is it not?

> If it becomes a problem then we have to deal with it by finding new avenues

That's the correct approach, but so far the strategy has been a combination of denial (which I hear an echo of in the word "if") and inaction. Protectionism is a dead end, but so are denial and inaction. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

>so far

Since alphabet's invention put ancient egyptian hieroglyph writers out of jobs, we as a society has put up with it just fine.

After 50 years of a rising tide failing to float most boats in the US, "putting up with it just fine" wouldn't be my take on the issue.

You're just paying the price of rest of the world catching up. Privilege of getting out of World War 2 as the pretty much only major unaffected economy could not be sustained for a century, ya know?

Straw man argument - I didn’t say we have to pay people to do this, but today you have to be paid to eat. I’m all for eliminating the requirement for work to live.

The answer seems to be that these stores wouldn't have existed in the first place. For now, at least, they're not taking jobs away.

> The store is part of the Lifvs chain, a Stockholm-based start-up that launched in 2018 with the goal of returning stores to remote rural locations where shops had closed down because they'd struggled to stay profitable.

Except these aren’t the only stores like this, and they aren’t and won’t stay in only remote locations. Automation and self service will continue to grow, and collectively we need to figure out how to care for our fellow humans that will lose out due to the evolution.

The whole history of human civilization is one kind of labor replacing another, with no shortage of people wondering about how the new being a destructive force doesn’t make it a social evil.

The people who would have worked at this kind of shop will find other jobs created or otherwise enabled by the lowered costs of automation.

The whole of the industrial and now computer revolution has been the degradation of human existence in the name of profit and progress. Elimination of employment that is a requirement for sustenance and a non-miserable life is common.

Automation doesn’t create jobs, it shifts them, generally towards less well paid options. Sure there are a few engineers who make more money, but what about the non skilled laborers?

> Sure there are a few engineers who make more money, but what about the non skilled laborers

That’s a political problem. Obvious solution is to transfer wealth from those who have it to those that don’t. Make higher education free, pay people to learn, or to do research, universal basic income, etc.

Agreed these are policy problems, but as creators of technology we're responsible for the outcomes as well. Ignoring the problems in the name of progress, as others replying to my thread seem want to do, is unethical and immoral.

I’m on board with your suggestion. Let’s implement it. Alongside the progress in automation, not as an afterthought.

Today’s unskilled laborers live in ways that would make preindustrial kings envious.

Because people who would have worked in a shop like this can only work in a shop like this.

How many people would have worked in a small grocery store for a town of 1000? I'm no expert, but I know there's small corner shops that have just one person running them with maybe another one or two people helping them. Full rotation staff, maybe 10? That's 1% of the local workforce.

I mean what do the 1000 people in the town do for a living to buy food?

Let’s extrapolate then. Assume these stores spread to an entire country, since they’re not just located in rural areas. We'll also stick with 1% of the population losing jobs. In the US that’s over 3 million people. What should those people do instead?

Did the manure shovelers' families all die in squalor once Henry Ford brought the auto assembly line to scale?

You’re comparing two labor intensive efforts. This is an article about a store that has no in-store employees. What jobs does such a store have to offer as a replacement?

> but not every country is as socially conscious

I think you answered your own question.

Yea I see more problems with this than benefits. Sure it's nice to have during corona times but what about after it when it's not necessary anymore?

As per the article: "[..] if there's less footfall than expected in one location, the wooden containers can easily be picked up and tested elsewhere"

Grocery stores will always be necessary, unless I misinterpret your question?

It’s not always about what is necessary because customer preferences can change, too. The automated ordering on machines in fast food restaurants or self-checkout in supermarkets may have been introcued to save businesses money and reinforced to limit interactions under COVID, but some people just prefer not to have that human interaction when it’s not absolutely required. As more people get used to and come to prefer managing things like that for themselves, the fact that it isn’t necessary will be overcome by the fact that people like it.

Yeah! I have a very soft voice. I’ve practiced to make it bigger, but even my loudest voice is not terribly loud. Ordering things behind the counter can be tough for me especially if there’s background noise of people chattering or machines whirring like in a coffee shop. Kind of an odd situation, and I’ve been able to get through life fine without self order kiosks, but I’m glad when they’re there because I just feel like I’m easier to deal with as a customer.

If it's necessary during COVID times, it could still be beneficial during non COVID times. Even if COVID goes away, there are plenty of other viruses lurking around that kill lots of people each year.

Is your point that there should never be a job displacing technology or that retail workers are a special class that should be protected from automation?

My point is that our fellow citizens deserve dignity of work and an ability to feed themselves. This is but one example of automation displacing workers, but there are plenty of other examples that also include non automation related job eliminations.

So you're arguing the first one, never implement technology to save labor because people deserve the dignity of work. How far should we take this? Should we burn the tractors? We could create lots of new jobs for agricultural laborers. Or perhaps the government, instead of handing out welfare, could pay people to dig holes and fill them in again.

As above, you use a straw man argument. I said nothing of the sort, and your jumping to that conclusion is rude.

You’re welcome to ignore the questions I raise, but hungry people won’t give a shit about your philosophy when they upend the systems that have abandoned them.

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