Hacker News Reader

Comment by acomar | Hacker News Reader

here's the difference: the farmers are large industrial companies that lobby the government for subsidies, such that they can continue to produce food that can, by law, never be eaten.

programmers, on the other hand, are wage laborers, individually selling their labor to employers who profit by paying them less.

industry is sitting on the opposite side of the equation here. I wonder what will replace "learn to code". whatever it is, the irony will be almost as rich as the businesses that profit from all this.

View on HN

It's hard to use history to predict the implications of weird new technologies. But history is clear on at least two happy facts. Technology generates new jobs -- no technology has led to widespread unemployment. (True general AI could be different; niche "AI" like this probably won't be.) Technology raises standards of living generally, and making a specific sector of the economy more productive increases the wealth accrued to that sector (although it can change who is in it too).

There are exceptions -- fancy weapons don't widely raise standards of living -- but the trends are strong.

what does unemployment have to do with it? if you're 22 and paying off loans and suddenly find yourself unable to work as much but a barista, continued employment isn't exactly a perk. meanwhile, the benefits of the increased productivity brought by new technology do accrue somewhere - it's just not with workers. the trends on that are also quite clear. productivity growth has been high over the past 40 years but real wages have at best been stagnant. and on the wheel turns, finding souls to grind beneath it's weight, anew.

On your second point I agree -- the distribution within a sector matters, and most of them at the moment are disturbingly top-heavy.

On the first though, we have little reason to think tech will systematically diminish the roles people can fill. In the broad, the opposite has tended to happen throughout history -- although the narrow exceptions, like factory workers losing their jobs to robots, are real, and deserve more of a response than almost every government in the world has provided. For political stability, let alone justice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com